


Streams

by my_mad_fatuation



Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-25 03:56:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9801629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/my_mad_fatuation/pseuds/my_mad_fatuation
Summary: Rae graduates from school and enters the workforce where she encounters a young man from another stream and forms a secret friendship.





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> This is sort of a parody of YA dystopian fiction, so if it seems silly, that's because it is.

I tried to tug on the bottom of my dress as I stood in front of the mirror, but it kept flaring out at my hips.

“Stop that, Rae,” my mother said to me. “You’re going to tear it if you keep fussing with it. Just leave it!”

“I don’t like wearing dresses,” I said.

“It’s a special occasion,” she said, “and on special occasions, girls wear dresses. That’s the rule.”

“It’s a stupid rule.”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “I don’t make the rules, all right? Now come on, we’re going to be late.”

My father was already waiting in the car when we got outside. I could tell this wasn’t how he wished to be spending his afternoon, but it was his child’s graduation and he was obligated to attend and pretend to care. It wasn’t how I wished to be spending the afternoon, either. But it was my own graduation, so I was obligated to attend and pretend to care as well.

The ceremony was being held in a large building with several auditoriums, so we had to follow the signs for “Stream 2 Graduates” to make sure we went to the right one. I noticed that some of the girls heading towards the auditorium for “Stream 3 Graduates” weren’t wearing dresses, though, and I was a little jealous.

The rumour going around the Stream 2 school was that kids in other streams got to do pretty much whatever they wanted; Stream 1 kids were above the law and Stream 3 kids were beneath it. It made me wish I wasn’t Stream 2, some days.

“There you are,” Archie said when I got to the front of the auditorium to sit with my stream-mates. “I was worried you weren’t going to make it.”

“I’m here,” I replied before he gave me a peck on the lips.

Archie was my boyfriend. That meant that he and I were supposed to get married when we turned eighteen in two years. He was the only boy in my year and stream that I could stand to talk to, so I figured he was my best choice. If I had to spend the rest of my life bickering with someone, I’d rather it be him.

We sat down and waited for the ceremony to begin. The headmaster took the stage and said a few words before introducing Philip, the valedictorian, who made a speech about how wonderful his school years had been and how he was looking forward to joining the workforce tomorrow, et cetera. At the end, he punched the air and exclaimed, “S2!” and everyone else did the same in response. I did it, too, even though I thought it was stupid. It was just what you did. Stream pride was important, apparently.

We, the graduates, were called up one at a time to receive our diplomas and shake the headmaster’s hand. It was probably the first time I’d ever made physical contact with an S1, besides my doctor. It was weird.

Archie held my hand as we left the auditorium after the ceremony and headed towards our parents’ cars. The parking lot was jammed full; S1s usually got cars as graduation gifts from their parents, whereas S2s didn’t get a car until their wedding, and even then they had to pay for it themselves. And S3s just took the bus.

“It’s going to be weird that I won’t see you at school tomorrow,” Archie said to me.

“We can hang out after work, if you want,” I told him. “Tell each other about our first day of training.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I’d like that.”

***

My father dropped me off at the Dominion Building on his way to work the next day.

“I’ll pick you up right here just after five, all right?” he said as I got out of the car.

“Yeah, I got it,” I replied, slamming the door shut. The fact that I was getting driven to work by my father just screamed “Trainee” and I felt like everyone was staring.

I found the Stream 2 entrance and hurried inside the first set of doors. I held out my wrist to have my barcode scanned so I could get through the second set of doors. The scanner took a few seconds and for a moment I worried that they’d forgotten to add my barcode to the system to let me in, but it was fine.

I took the lift up to the fourth floor, where I was meant to be working, and asked the first person I saw where I could find Olivia, who was supposed to be training me.

“Everyone else is already in the conference room,” the person said, pointing towards a nearby door. “You’re late.”

I knew I shouldn’t have let my mother convince me to change my top at the last minute before leaving the house. The one I’d had on was perfectly fine, but she made some passive aggressive comment about it and I just couldn’t wear it anymore.

I rushed over to the conference room and opened the door; everyone inside—a woman and two kids my age—turned to look at me. I recognized the kids from my stream, but I’d never really associated with them much before.

“As I was saying,” the woman—presumably Olivia—said, “today is just about getting to know the lay of the land. You’ll meet the rest of the team. You’ll set up your computer accounts. You’ll learn where everything is. It’s going to be fun, all right?” She stopped and looked at me again. “You must be Rae,” she added. “You’re late.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again.”

“I should hope not.” Olivia turned to the others and clapped her hands together. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

She gave us a tour of the offices, introducing us to everyone we passed—though I felt like I would never remember anyone’s name—and showing us where to find the toilets and the coffeemaker and the dusty old printer that nobody used anymore.

“These will be your desks for the next two years,” Olivia told us when she stopped in front of a sectioned-off area of the office. She introduced us to the two second-year trainees who were working there already and let us get set up on our computers.

I sat down at the desk with my name on it and tried scanning my barcode to turn on the computer, but it wouldn’t work. I tried three more times, and nothing.

“Hey,” I said to the second-year trainee sitting next to me. “I can’t get my computer to work.”

“Get someone from IT, then,” he said without looking up from his computer.

“Okay. Thanks,” I said. I had no idea how to contact anyone from IT, as I couldn’t get onto the computer to call or message anyone. I figured I would have to do it the old-fashioned way and actually get out of my seat to find someone.

I sighed, like this was the worst thing in the world, as I stood up and went looking for the IT department. I had to ask directions from a couple of people before I found it.

A young man was just leaving the area as I approached. He looked to be of a similar age as me—perhaps a second-year trainee—but he was dressed fairly casually for an S2 on-duty. But IT people were like that, weren’t they?

“Excuse me,” I said as he walked by.

He stopped and looked at me. “Are you talking to me?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s just, it’s my first day, and I can’t login to the computer,” I explained, holding up my wrist for a second.

“Okay…”

“Can you help me?”

“No,” he said before he turned and continued walking away.

I kept walking towards the IT area until I saw someone else leaving. I asked if she could help me, and she said she’d be there in five minutes, though it was probably more like eight by the time she got to my desk.

She turned on the computer with her barcode, typed in some stuff I didn’t understand, and then scanned my barcode to authorize me.

When I finally got onto the computer, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, so I just scrolled through the database looking for people with funny-sounding names. It was going to be a long day.

***

I wasn’t really sure what to do at lunch time. My mother had packed me a lunch, but it seemed like most people were going to the cafeteria downstairs to get their lunches. I didn’t want to join them only to have to eat my crappy sandwich in front of them, so I stayed behind at my desk while everyone left and I ate by myself. (Unfortunately the office had blocked all of the fun Net-sites so I didn’t have any entertainment.)

When I was nearly done my sandwich, I heard a voice coming from a desk a few cubicles away. Not just a voice; a singing voice. Was there an S1 in this department?

I got up to investigate, but when I found the source of the voice, it was the rude IT guy, going through someone else’s rubbish bin.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

He appeared startled to see me standing outside the cubicle. “What do you mean?” he said.

“Why are you going through people’s rubbish?”

“I’m not going through their rubbish,” he said defensively. “I’m emptying their bins.”

“So, what, you’re pretending to be a custodian?” I said with my hands on my hips.

“I am a custodian,” he replied.

Custodian was a Stream 3 job, yet I’d heard him singing, which was a Stream 1 thing. True, he was dressed more like an S3, but sometimes S1s were eccentric.

“Why are you a custodian if you’re S1?” I asked.

“I’m not… I’m S3.”

“But, you were singing…”

“So?”

“So I thought only S1s could sing,” I said.

He laughed. “Anyone can sing.”

“But you’re… good at it.”

“Well, thanks, but I’m still an S3,” he said.

“Sorry.”

“I’m fine being an S3; you don’t need to be sorry.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “What are you doing here, anyway? Shouldn’t you be at lunch?”

“I brought my lunch from home.”

“Now who seems like the S3?” he teased.

“Hey!” I said, smiling a little. “My mom just thought she was being helpful.”

“What’d she pack you?”

“A sandwich and a packet of crisps.”

“What kind?”

“Cheese and onion.”

“Oh, my favourite.”

“Can S3s even get crisps?” I asked. I realized I had absolutely no idea what people in other streams ate.

He laughed again. “S3s can get everything. I can get stuff you’ve never even heard of.”

“Like what?” I asked skeptically.

“Alcohol,” he said.

“I’ve heard of alcohol.”

“Yeah, but have you ever had it?”

“Of course not; it’s contraband.”

He smiled and shrugged. “Doesn’t stop me.”

“So is it true that enforcers don’t care what S3s do?”

“You have to be careful about it, obviously,” he said. “But generally they’re willing to turn a blind eye as long as you’re not disturbing anyone from the upper streams.”

“Wow,” I said. “Is it great?”

“Is what great?”

“Alcohol.”

His smile broadened. “You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”

***

“So how did training go?” I asked Archie as we got settled with cushions of the floor of my bedroom. My computer was playing some music from one of my favourite Net-sites.

“It was mostly just showing us where the coffeemaker is,” he replied.

“Yeah, same,” I said.

“I wanted to become a nurse so I could help people,” he said. “Not make people coffee.”

“For some people, that helps.”

“Very funny.”

“My day was pretty boring, too,” I said before lowering my voice. “Though I did end up talking to an S3 for a while.”

“What do you mean you talked to an S3?” he asked, like he didn’t believe it.

“I talked to a custodian during lunch and shared some of my crisps with him,” I said. “His name is Finn.”

“You know an S3 by name?”

“Yeah.” I giggled a little. “He’s pretty fun to talk to.”

“You aren’t supposed to have _fun_ talking to someone from another stream,” Archie pointed out.

“Did you know that he can get contraband?” I continued. “Like alcohol and stuff.”

“So he’s a criminal.”

“I don’t think it’s as big of a crime for S3s…”

“Rae…” he said seriously after a moment. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“Okay…”

He seemed to wait for the next song to start playing before he carried on, probably to make sure no one else would hear him. “You know how in school we learned about reproduction?”

“Yes…” I hoped I wasn’t blushing. I always turned red when I thought about that stuff.

Technically, once we were married, I was going to have to reproduce with Archie, though he was not the one that came to mind whenever I thought about reproduction. Garrett was another stream-mate in our year, who was tedious to talk to, but nice to look at. Sometimes I thought about what it would be like to kiss him instead of Archie. And then I’d have to take a cold shower.

“So, you know how my… part… is supposed to go… in your part?” he began.

I put my hand on the side of my face like I was holding up my chin. “Mm-hmm,” I replied awkwardly.

“But in order to do that, it has to… you know… get… you know…”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. My face was hot, I could tell.

“Okay, so, the thing is, it doesn’t do that when I kiss you,” he said.

“Maybe we’re just kissing wrong?” I suggested.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said, “but when I think about kissing someone else, it does.”

“Who?”

“…Garrett.”

“Oh.” I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “But he’s… a boy…?”

“I know!” Archie said. He sounded like he was freaked out.

“How does that work, then?” I asked. “Two boys can’t reproduce, can they?”

“I don’t know!”

“But your… part… gets ready to reproduce when you think about kissing him?”

“Kissing him, touching him; yeah, pretty much.”

“I mean, I can’t say I blame you, really. I’ve thought about reproducing with him myself.”

“Do you think I’m a freak, Rae?” he asked.

“Archie,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder, “I don’t know what you are, but you are not a freak.”

***

“Can I ask you something?” I said to Finn at lunch the next day while he sat on the other side of the empty trainee cubicle. I was trying to toss Hula Hoops into his mouth; he managed to catch them more than half the time.

“Yeah,” he said as he crunched on the last one he’d caught.

I motioned with my head for him to come closer and he wheeled his chair towards me. “Have you ever… Have you ever heard of two boys kissing?” I asked shyly.

“Heard of it? I’ve seen it,” he said, like it was no big deal.

“What? Where?”

“Downtown. Boys kiss each other all the time at the Victory Club.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, why?”

“My boyfriend, Archie, told me that he sometimes thinks about kissing boys and he wanted to know if that made him a freak.”

“I don’t think so,” said Finn. “But he probably shouldn’t be your boyfriend if he’d rather be kissing boys.”

“Why not?” I asked.

He laughed a little. “Are you kidding?”

“Boys can’t reproduce together, can they?”

“Not _literally_ ,” he said, “but they can still have sex.”

I clapped my hand over my mouth in shock. I couldn’t believe he’d say something so crass in the workplace. “How does that even work?” I whispered, tittering. “For reproduction, you need—”

“There’s a lot more to sex than reproduction, Rae,” he said blatantly.

“That’s not what we learned in school,” I said.

“What about outside of school?” He smiled like he was trying not to laugh at me. “What did you learn in your extra-curricular activities?”

“You mean Chess Club?”

He finally laughed. “No, not Chess Club.”

“I don’t know what you mean, then.”

“I mean haven’t you ever fooled around with anyone?”

“…Like April Fools? I don’t understand.”

“Shit, you S2s are really sheltered, aren’t you?”

“No, we’re not! I’ve done lots of bad stuff!”

“Such as…?”

“One time I let a girl cheat off my Maths exam,” I said defiantly.

He bit his lip to keep from laughing again.

“All right,” I added, also trying not to laugh. “So I’ve never had alcohol, or _S-E-X_ , or—”

“It’s fine, Rae,” he said, still smiling. “You don’t have to have done those things.”

“Okay…”

“You and your boyfriend should come downtown with me some time, though.”

“We should?”

“It’ll be fun. Here,” he said, picking up a pen off my neighbour’s desk—she liked to leave herself physical sticky note reminders all over the place; she was a bit old-fashioned. “May I?”

“Um…” I wasn’t sure what he was asking until he rolled up my sleeve and started writing on my arm. The pen tickled, but all I could think about was how warm his hand was against my skin as he held my arm steady.

“That’s my Net-address,” he said when he’d finished writing. “Send me a message and we’ll make a plan, all right?”

“All right.”

“I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll see you later, Rae.”

“Yeah,” I said. I gently traced my fingers over the address written on my arm, careful not to smudge the ink, before rolling down my sleeve to hide it. If anyone were to find out I’d gotten a S3’s Net-address, I’d probably be fired. Or worse.

***

I’d been Net-messaging Finn several nights in a row before he suggested that Archie and I meet him downtown to go to the Victory Club, so that Archie could see boys kissing and know that he wasn’t a freak.

I told my parents that Archie and I were going to the cinema; they would have been needlessly worried if they knew that I was going downtown, especially that I was going downtown to hang out with an S3. I told them that we didn’t need a ride since the cinema was walking distance from our houses, but we were going to have to take the bus to actually get downtown.

We couldn’t use credit to pay for the bus, however, because our parents paid our bills and would see the charge. So I scraped together all the cash I could find that I’d received as gifts over the years—I had no idea how much the bus cost, but I hoped it would be enough.

As it turned out, the bus cost far less than I was expecting, so I had plenty of cash for the evening. I didn’t want to use credit anywhere downtown, either.

Finn had given me the address of the club and told me to meet him outside, but he wasn’t there when Archie and I arrived.

“Are you lost?” some guy asked us, sneering.

“No, we’re fine, thank you,” Archie said tersely.

The guy scoffed. “Fuckin’ S2s.”

“How did he know we were S2s?” Archie asked me in a whisper once the guy had walked away.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we look too uptight.”

“There she is!” someone called out behind me.

I turned to see Finn walking towards us with his arms open.

“Rae!” he said before giving me a big hug. He let go and looked at Archie. “You must be Archie,” he added, giving him a hug as well.

Archie looked panic-stricken as he was being hugged.

“You’re, uh, really friendly tonight,” I said to Finn, who was behaving even more strangely than usual. Maybe it was just because we were out of the office.

He smiled and motioned for us to follow him to a dark spot between the buildings. “I’ve had a bit of friendly juice,” he said, pulling a small rectangular bottle out of his jacket. “You want some?”

“Is that… alcohol?” Archie asked incredulously.

Finn slapped him on the back. “That it is, my pal. Here.”

“No, thanks.”

“I’ll try it,” I said, standing up straighter, like I was trying to prove that I was tough enough to handle it.

Finn handed the bottle to me and I took a courageous gulp. It tasted like burning.

“Oh my gosh!” I said once I managed to swallow it.

He laughed at me as I handed the bottle back. “All right, there?”

I coughed. “Yeah, great.”

He took a sip before he tucked the bottle back into his jacket and we followed him to the front door of the club.

“ID,” said the guy at the door, like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

Finn rolled back the sleeve of his jacket and let the guy scan his barcode.

I tugged on the back of Finn’s jacket to get his attention. “We have to get scanned?” I asked.

“It’s just to make sure you’re not a known enforcer,” he said. “But this is one of the few places that doesn’t charge you to get in.”

“Okay…” I said hesitantly.

“I’m not sure about this, Rae,” said Archie quietly into my ear.

“Don’t you want to see boys kissing boys?” I replied. Heck, even I was curious to see that.

He sighed heavily but pulled his wrist out of his sleeve to get scanned right after I did.

We got inside and I was flabbergasted. There was music with a pulsating beat that made me want to sway my hips and shoulders with the bustling group of bodies in the middle of the club. And there were definitely boys kissing boys.

“Fuck,” Archie muttered under his breath. I smacked him lightly for swearing.

“Not bad, right?” said Finn proudly.

The warmth from the alcohol, combined with the music, was starting to make me feel happy, like I just wanted to dance. I started bopping my head to the rhythm and tapping my foot.

“Yeah, come on,” he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me towards the dancing people. “Archie, get over here.”

Archie trudged along behind us, though he didn’t start dancing when we did. Finn and I had to pull on Archie’s arms to get him moving at all.

“What kind of music is this?” I said loudly into Finn’s ear so he could hear me.

“Um, electro swing, I suppose…?” he said with a laugh.

“I like it!”

“Me, too.”

We both looked at Archie expectantly, waiting for his assessment of the music. “It’s fine, I guess,” he said. The song faded into the next one, which had a bit of a grooving bass-line, which got even his shoulders swinging.

By the third song, he was dancing without any assistance from either of us, and a guy came up and started dancing with him. Archie looked at me for a moment, like he wanted me to save him, but he soon just gave into it and danced anyway.

“How often do you come here?” I said to Finn.

“What?” He hadn’t heard me.

I put my hand on his shoulder so I could repeat my question directly in his ear.

“Most weeks,” he replied in my ear.

“Do you like kissing boys, too?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then why do you come here?” I asked. When I looked around, I could only see boys kissing boys—and a few girls kissing girls, which I hadn’t realized was also a thing until that moment.

“Free dancing and cheap booze,” he said.

“They sell alcohol here?”

He gave me a condescending smile and took my hand again, leading me towards the back of the club. There was a door at the very back with another man standing guard in front of it. “Hi,” Finn said to the man. “We’d like to buy some lemonade.”

The man gave us a once-over before opening the door and letting us through.

“I don’t like lemonade,” I said quietly to Finn as we walked down a dimly-lit corridor.

“It’s a codeword, genius,” he said with a laugh.

“Oh…”

There was a curtain at the end of the corridor, which he drew aside to reveal a whole other room to the club. One wall of which was lined with various bottles, with a counter in front of it. There were a couple of people standing between the wall and the counter, and several more people sitting along the other side of it.

Finn and I approached the counter, and the woman behind it greeted us. “Hey, Finn,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”

“This is Rae,” he said. “She’s an S2 and this is her first time downtown.”

The woman gave me a condescending smile as well. “That’s adorable.”

“Two shots of whatever is cheapest,” he added, pounding his fist on the counter.

She rolled her eyes, like she knew he was going to say that, and grabbed a bottle from the wall. She poured the liquid into two small glasses and placed them on the counter in front of us. He rolled up his sleeve again and she scanned his barcode with a portable scanner.

“You’re paying with credit?” I asked him in disbelief.

“Yeah…” he said, as though he didn’t see the problem with that.

“Won’t your parents find out where you’ve been spending money?”

“Um, I pay my own bills, Rae.”

“Really? You’re not saving for a house?”

He laughed. “You really don’t understand Stream 3, do you?”

I looked at him blankly. I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I rent my own flat with the money I make cleaning up other people’s shit,” he said. “Because I will never be able to afford to buy a fucking house.”

“Sorry…”

“Come on,” he added, picking up one of the glasses. “Drink up.”

I drank the mystery liquid in one gulp; I was starting to enjoy the burning taste. I bought the next round with some of my cash.

“Should we… um… We should check on Archie, shouldn’t we?” I said after the third one.

“Yep,” he said. “Yeah, we should.”

I held onto his arm as we walked back towards the curtained entrance and through to the corridor, where he stopped. “What…?” I said, and the next thing I knew he was pushing me against the wall and kissing me.

It was nothing like kissing Archie. It wasn’t even anything like I’d imagined kissing Garrett. But I was still going to need a cold shower, ASAP.

“We should go find Archie,” he said after a minute, resting his forehead against mine.

“Right,” I said. I’d completely forgotten about Archie. That probably wasn’t a good sign.

We made our way back to the main part of the club, where we found Archie kissing the guy he’d been dancing with. So he was fine, apparently. I still needed to go home and have that shower, though.

***

I did not feel well the morning after I got home from the Victory Club.

“How was the film last night?” my mother asked me over breakfast.

“Good,” I said as I pushed a scrambled egg-like substance around my plate. I didn’t feel I could eat anything.

“You must have come home pretty late, though,” said my father. “We were asleep before you got back.”

“I was just hanging out with Archie. We went and got chips after the film. He paid,” I added, so that they wouldn’t wonder why there were no charges to my credit. “It was sweet.”

“How’s his training going?” she said.

“All right, I guess,” I replied. “I think so far he’s just been making coffee and learning where everything is. Kind of like me.”

“You haven’t done much data processing, then?” he asked.

“Just a bit of copying numbers from one column into another column. They didn’t even explain why we had to do it, they just told us to do it.”

My father laughed a bit. “Welcome to the real world. Nobody ever tells you why.”

“Surely that must get frustrating,” I said. “Don’t you ever wonder why you’re doing something?”

“It’s easier not to ask,” said my mother.

“What happens if you ask?”

“You’d probably get a really boring answer,” she said.

“It’s just procedure,” he said. “No one really know why things work they way they do, all that matters is that they work.”

“Like Streams?” I asked offhandedly.

Both my parents looked taken aback.

“Why would you question Streams?” said my mother.

“Streams has been working for hundreds of years,” said my father. “Again, no one knows why, but it does. It works.”

“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to question it, just… Doesn’t it sometimes seem kind of stupid?” I said. “I can’t socialize with an S3 just because he’s an S3? How does that make sense?”

“Who’s an S3?” he asked.

“No one, it was just a hypothetical example.”

“Look,” he continued, “it’s all right to say good morning when you pass an S1 or S3 at work, but you can’t _socialize_ with them. They’re just so different from us, Rae.”

“Are they?”

“S3s live in tiny flats with no windows and they eat dog food.”

“I don’t think they eat dog food…” I said.

“They don’t trust us. And you can’t trust someone who doesn’t trust you.”

“Sure…”

“I mean it, Rae,” he said seriously. “You can only trust S2s.”

***

“My dad says I can’t trust you,” I told Finn at work the next day. Everyone else was having lunch in the cafeteria, so he and I spun around on desk chairs for a while.

“Your dad doesn’t even know me,” he said as he pushed off from my desk to spin again.

“He says that S3s don’t trust us S2s, and we shouldn’t trust anyone who doesn’t trust us.” I tried to imitate my father’s manner of speaking when I said it.

“Hey, I trust S2s,” he said defensively. “I find them to be pretty trustworthy people, generally. They’re usually too scared of getting in trouble to lie.”

“I lied to my parents the other night!”

“Yeah, but you were lying for me, not against me. So I trust you.” He stopped spinning and smiled. “Do you trust me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It turns out that alcohol makes you feel terrible the next day, and I never should have let you buy me all those drinks.”

“I never claimed otherwise, though, so really it’s not my fault.”

“Fine, then I guess I trust you.”

He got up from his chair and picked up my hands. “Do you want to see something cool?”

“Okay…” I got up as well and followed him as he led me by the hand towards the opposite side of the fourth floor, stopping at every cubicle opening to make sure no one was there who would see us.

We ducked around behind the IT department and down a small passageway to a door that I never knew was there. It hadn’t been part of my initial tour of the office, I was certain.

“What’s in there?” I asked quietly.

“The Archive,” he said.

“I thought the Archive was digital.”

“It is now, but this stuff used to all be done on paper, and they keep everything.” He pulled up his sleeve and scanned his barcode to unlock the door.

“Why does your barcode let you into this room?” I said as I followed him inside.

“We’re about to start relocating all the paper files to a central repository, and we have to dismantle the filing cabinets and pack up all the files and all of that,” he explained. “So, of course, us custodians get to do that job.”

I looked around the room; it was bigger than I’d been expecting. It appeared to be nearly a quarter the size of the rest of the fourth floor. And it contained rows and rows of big metal cabinets. “And these are all full of paper?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“I didn’t think there was ever that much paper in the world.”

“And this is just one branch. There are more like this all over the country.”

“Yikes.”

“Pretty cool, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Scary, but cool.”

“Come on, there’s something I wanted to show you at the back,” he said, taking me by the hand again. He stopped when we reached the far corner of the room

I examined the area, looking for something that seemed different than the rest of the space, but it was all metal cabinets. “What did you want to show me?”

“This,” he said, then he put his hand on my face and kissed me.

I held onto the sides of his jumper and pulled him closer. I felt all warm again, even though I hadn’t been drinking.

“We should probably get back to work,” he said after a minute, and then smiled at me. “To be continued?”

***

“As much as I enjoy sneaking into the Archive to make out with you on your lunch break,” Finn had said to me, “it would be nice to get to spend a bit more time together, don’t you think?”

“I guess…” I’d said in response.

He ended up suggesting that I come visit him at his flat—even stay overnight—so we could watch Net-films and eat crisps and drink alcohol together.

I made sure it was the night before Rest Day; my parents would never let me stay out on a work night. Also I told them I was sleeping over at Archie’s house. (I’d never lied to my parents so much in my life.) (Maybe S3s were bad influences.)

I gathered up my cash to take the bus almost all the way downtown, where Finn’s flat was located. He was waiting for me at the bus stop, to make sure I found it okay. He gave me a hug and kissed me on the cheek when I got off the bus, and I followed him to his building.

“Hey, you’ve got a window,” I said as I entered his flat for the first time.

“Of course I have a window,” he said, like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

Other than the window, though, the place was just a box. “You’ve only got one room,” I said.

“And a bathroom,” he added, pointing at a door on the right-hand wall.

The far wall had the window, the left-hand wall had a sofa, and the wall behind me had the entrance and some small kitchen appliances and cupboards.

“It’s pretty small,” I said. “Where do you even sleep?”

He pointed at the sofa. “It’s a sofa bed.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means it folds out into a bed.”

I frowned. That didn’t sound pleasant. “Oh. So… where will I sleep?” I asked. Usually when I spent the night at Archie’s place, I would sleep on the sofa.

“It’s big enough for both of us,” he said.

“What?” I said. “We can’t share a bed!”

“Why not?”

“Because we’re not married!”

“So?”

“So, only married couples are allowed to share a bed.”

He laughed. “Says who?”

“Says everyone! Says the rules!”

“The rules also say you’re not supposed to lie to your parents or drink alcohol,” he said. “Or let girls cheat off your Maths exam. You’re a rebel, Rae.”

“Still…” I said. “I’m not old enough to… reproduce.” I hugged my overnight bag against myself, embarrassed to be talking about this.

“What?”

“I can’t share a bed with you because I can’t reproduce until I’m eighteen!”

“You’re just… You’re wrong on so many levels,” he said, shaking his head. “First of all, if you menstruate, you can reproduce. Second, not all sex leads to reproduction. And third, sharing a bed doesn’t mean you have to have sex.”

He’d just used so many words that made me uncomfortable, that I had to cover my face with my hands. I honestly didn’t know what to think. “How…” I began slowly, peeking out from between my fingers. “How can… it… not lead to reproduction?”

“You mean sex?”

I nodded tightly.

He sat down on the sofa-that-was-also-a-bed and crossed his legs. “Do you want to sit down for this, or…?”

I shook my head.

“Okay, so, basically, if you consider sex to be anything that brings sexual pleasure, then there are a lot of non-procreative forms of sex,” he said, holding up his hands like he was demonstrating how large the category was. “There’s manual stimulation, oral stimulation, contraceptives—”

“Aren’t those illegal?”

He gave me another one of his condescending smiles. “Do you think that stops me?”

“I guess not…” I said timidly. “So, does this mean we’re going to…?”

“Jeez, Rae, no,” he said with a laugh. “We don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with, and if you’re not even comfortable sitting next to me right now, then we sure as hell aren’t doing anything else tonight.”

“I can sit next to you,” I replied, dropping my hands and standing tall. I walked towards the sofa and sat down at the opposite end from him.

He laughed again. “So,” he said. “Which Net-film should we watch first?”

***

“I don’t know about you,” Finn said after our second Net-film, “but I am beat.”

I yawned and nodded. “Me, too.”

“Get up,” he added, standing up and pulling me to my feet. “I’ll make the bed.”

“I’m just going to… change… in the bathroom,” I said, picking up my overnight bag off the floor.

“Sure.”

The bathroom was tiny—it didn’t even have a bathtub. Just a shower, which was barely big enough for a person, a toilet, and a pedestal sink. There was hardly enough room for me to change into my pyjamas—I actually banged my arm on the shower door while I tried to get my shirt off.

I brushed my teeth—my mouth tasted gross from all the alcohol and the cheese and onion crisps—and stared at my reflection in the mirror for a minute. I didn’t really understand why Finn had kissed me so many times. It wasn’t as though he was obligated to, like Archie was. And it wasn’t as though I was good-looking enough for anyone to have fantasized about kissing me, like Garrett was.

I also worried about him trying to kiss me again. He said we weren’t going to do anything that made me uncomfortable, but I felt that my threshold for comfort shifted drastically while we were kissing. Normally I didn’t like hugging or touching people, for example, but when we were kissing I just wanted to hold him so close that there was no space between us.

“You all right in there, Rae?” he asked, knocking on the bathroom door.

“Yeah, I’ll just be a sec,” I said. I examined myself for another moment and took a deep breath before leaving the bathroom.

When I got to the main living space, the sofa was now flat like a bed and the only light in the room came from a small lamp on the table beside it. Finn was already lying on one side of the bed, leaving plenty of room for me on the other.

“You a big Hello Kitty fan?” he said as I approached cautiously.

“What?”

“Your pyjamas.”

I looked down at my pyjamas that were covered with cartoon cat faces. “I just thought they were cute. I like cats.”

“Okay, but Hello Kitty is a classic vintage pop culture icon,” he added. “You have to know what Hello Kitty is.”

“The cat on my pyjamas?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t know it was a pop culture icon.”

“Fine,” he said, putting his hands behind his head and smiling. He looked at me expectantly. “Are you getting in or what?”

“Sure…” I set my bag on the floor and lifted the blankets so I could climb into the bed.

He turned onto his side to face me, propping his head up with his arm.

“Finn,” I said as I rested my head against the pillow. “Will you tell me something about yourself?”

“Like what?” he asked, smiling again.

“I don’t know… What do your parents do? What does your sibling do?”

“Uh, well, my mom’s a caregiver at hospice, and my dad works in construction,” he said. “And I don’t have a sibling.”

“You don’t?”

He shook his head.

“You’re an only child? I didn’t think that was allowed anymore.”

“Well, I am. So…” He poked me in the side and I flinched. “What about your family?”

“My parents are both data processors, as well,” I said, like it was the most boring fact in the world. “And my older sister is an executive assistant, so she works directly for an S1. She’s pretty snooty about it.”

“S1s aren’t so great,” he said. “They act like their shit doesn’t stink, but trust me, it does.”

I stifled a laugh. I’d never really considered that S1s used the bathroom, too.

“What does a data processor do, exactly?” he asked, tracing squiggles on my arm with his fingertip.

“I… don’t really know yet,” I said, embarrassed. “So far I just move numbers between columns and make coffee.”

“You’re the one who’s been making the coffee lately?”

“Yeah, sometimes…”

“It’s really terrible,” he said with a laugh.

I gave him a small shove in his chest. “I don’t even drink coffee, so what do I know?”

He grabbed onto my hand and held it against his chest, curling his fingers around mine. I could feel his heart beating. It was faster than I was expecting, and made me feel like mine was speeding up, too.

I shifted closer to him as he leaned towards me so that his head was just above mine. My hand was still touching his chest, but now his hand was touching my chest as well. I put my free hand around the back of his head and brought my lips up to his. It was the first time I had started kissing him instead of the other way around.

He let go of my hand and put his arm around the other side of me, leaning further over me as I pressed my body firmly against him. His hand roamed up the back of my pyjama top; the feeling of him touching my bare skin was exhilarating. I wanted him to touch me all over like that…

“Finn?” I said when I managed to pry my mouth away from his.

“Mm-hmm?” he replied, kissing my neck and jawline instead.

“What did you mean when you said ‘manual stimulation,’ exactly?” I asked.

He stopped and looked at me for a moment before responding. “Um, it means, you know… touching each other…”

“Like this?” I asked as I moved my hand down to his chest again.

“Sort of…” He looked down between us. “Just… lower.”

“Can… Can you show me?”

***

“Have you ever looked at any of the files in here?” I asked Finn as we sat on the floor of the Archive, sharing the sandwich my mother had made me.

He shook his head because his mouth was full. “They’re all locked,” he said once he’d swallowed. “Physically locked. You need actual keys to get into these cabinets.”

“Who has the keys?”

“Probably the Head of Department, I guess.”

I brushed the crumbs off my trousers and stood up. “I want to see a really old file,” I said as I surveyed the area, looking at the dates on the fronts of the cabinets. “Like, hundreds of years old. Do you think they’d still have kept that stuff?”

“As far as I know, they’ve kept everything since the beginning of Streams,” he said. “And I don’t think the files have been moved before now. It’s just that they need more office space on this floor, and no one really uses these archives anymore.”

The cabinets appeared to be in chronological order, starting as recently as thirty years ago, so I followed them back in time until I reached the earliest one I could find. “This is weird,” I said as I examined the label more closely. “The earliest cabinet I can find is only from ninety-odd years ago.” I looked back at Finn who had come up behind me. “Are you sure they haven’t been moved before?”

“Maybe the building’s only been here for ninety-odd years,” he suggested.

“The Dominion Building is over three hundred years old. Didn’t you learn anything in your History classes?”

“Probably,” he said, smiling. “But it was boring so I forgot it.”

“I wish we had the keys,” I said. “I want to see one of the files.”

“Hmm…” Finn looked like he was considering something for a moment before he walked over to the front of the Archive room and picked up a toolbox that had been left by the door so that the custodians could start dismantling the cabinets. He pulled out a screwdriver and started to jam it into the lock.

“You’re going to break it!” I said.

“That’s the point,” he said. “It’s not like anyone’s going to notice.” He jammed it in there a couple more times and twisted it aggressively until it made a snapping sound, like a clasp breaking.

“I can’t believe you just did that,” I said, though I was laughing.

“Here, whose file would you like to peruse?” he asked as he opened the drawer. “Bret Wilkes? Evie Williamson? Gordon Wiltshire?”

“Anyone’s fine.”

“Gordon it is.” He pulled out the file and handed it to me, keeping his finger in its place so he could put it back in the drawer quickly.

“Gordon Wiltshire,” I read the front of the file aloud. “Age: thirty-seven. Location: Lincolnshire. Assignment: Stream 2…” I stopped and frowned at the folder in my hand before looking at Finn. “Assignment? People aren’t assigned into streams, they’re born into them.”

“Didn’t the first people have to be assigned?” he said.

“Yeah, five hundred years ago!” I gave him back the file and held out my hand. “Give me another.”

He handed me the file in front of it.

“Evie Williamson. Age: fifty-four. Location: Lincolnshire. Assignment: Stream 3.”

“Maybe they just mean ‘assignment’ like ‘designation,’” he added. “Not that they were literally assigned, right?”

“Maybe…” I said slowly. “Unless these were the first people…”


	2. Part Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After their discovery in the Archive, Rae and Finn seek to learn more about the history of Streams.

“You were always good at History, weren’t you, Archie?” I asked.

Archie and I were sitting on a bench in the park, watching people walk their dogs and trying to guess their dogs’ names. (“Sniffy,” I’d said for one of them.) (“What a stupid name,” Archie had replied.)

“I suppose so,” he said warily. “You’re not going to quiz me, are you?”

“No, it’s just… There’s not a lot of information about Streams before the last hundred years or so, right?” I said. “I mean, old books never mention it.”

“That’s because it used to be crass to talk about it openly,” he said. “S1s write all the books, and they’ve always been a little more prudish, haven’t they? At least publicly. I don’t know what they do behind closed doors.”

“So it’s not because… Streams didn’t exist… right?”

“What are you talking about? Streams has been around for over five hundred years. We learned that in school.”

“We also learned that boys can only kiss girls, and look how that turned out.”

“Yeah, well maybe boys _can_ kiss boys, but that doesn’t mean they should,” he said.

“Archie, I saw you kiss a boy at the Victory Club,” I pointed out.

“Well, I probably shouldn’t have!”

“Why not?”

“Because I liked it, all right?” he said. “More than I like kissing you.”

“That’s fine,” I told him. “I like kissing Finn more than I like kissing you, too.”

“But we have to get married. How are we supposed to do that if we don’t like kissing each other?” he asked.

I shrugged. “My parents never kiss each other, and they’re fine.”

“But how are we supposed to… reproduce… if we don’t like kissing each other?”

“Maybe we just won’t,” I said with a shrug.

“So, what, we just don’t have children, and pay the fine?”

“I guess…”

“Okay…” He seemed to relax a little. “The idea of raising children freaks me out, anyway.”

“Me, too!” I replied excitedly. It was just nice to know I wasn’t alone in having such horrible thoughts. “Our marriage can be just like this,” I added. “You and me, hanging out together, and kissing other boys.”

“All right,” he said. “I’d like that.”

***

I pushed up my bracelet to have my barcode scanned. It was a warm night, so I didn’t feel like wearing a jacket—I liked to wear a bracelet when I didn’t have long sleeves because I worried about having my barcode illegally scanned by some pickpocket.

Archie and I were back at the Victory Club, looking for Finn, who had agreed to meet us inside. It was busier than last time, so it took us a while to find him.

“I wonder if all these guys’ wives know they’re here kissing other guys,” I said loudly to Archie as we skirted the perimeter of the dance floor. “Maybe some of them are lying to their wives about where they are, kind of like how we’re lying to our parents. But,” I added, looking him in the eye, “we’ll never have to lie to each other, right?”

“Right,” he said.

I smiled at him and kissed him on the cheek.

“Hey, now!” He wiped off the side of his face. “I don’t want people here thinking you’re my girlfriend, do I?”

“But I am your girlfriend,” I said tauntingly, tugging on his hand.

“Well, I don’t need to advertise it,” he said. “You should go look for Finn.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Find someone to dance with.”

“I could—”

“Someone besides you.”

“Fine,” I said, pretending to pout.

I watched him move into the mass of dancing bodies, and thought about how this was nothing like our dances at school. There was no arm’s length distance rule or dress code. There was hardly any space between the people at all.

I continued to circle the club until I spotted Finn standing in the corner, talking to some girl. He laughed at something she said and she touched his arm. I felt something like anger rising up inside of me; anger that she was touching him and I wasn’t. I’d only ever felt like this when my grandparents gave my sister more money for her birthday than they gave me for mine. My parents said I was just being greedy. Was that what this feeling was? Greed?

I clenched my hands into fists until the feeling subsided a little before I continued walking towards them. Finn smiled broadly when he spotted me.

“Here she is,” he said when I approached, and took a step closer so he could hug me. “I was just telling Chloe here about you. Oh, yeah, this is my friend Chloe,” he added, putting his hand on the other girl’s back. “Chloe, this is Rae.”

“Nice to finally meet you,” said Chloe. She looked me over like she was sizing me up, but I was doing the same to her.

She didn’t look like an S3 to me. She was dressed quite casually, as was everyone in the club, but her hair was just so smooth; I’d never seen anyone with hair like that in real life. She looked like a celebrity.

“So, tell me, Rae,” she added. “What do you do?”

“I’m a first-year data processing trainee,” I said as though I were ashamed of it. (Which, to be fair, I sort of was.) “You?”

She smiled insincerely at me. “I’m a first-year performer trainee.”

“Performer?” I asked. “But… that’s Stream One…?”

She and Finn both laughed. “Of course it is,” she said. “I’m an S1.”

“Really? What are you doing downtown, then?”

“Hanging out with my good pal, Finn,” she replied as she mussed his hair.

“Hey, quit it,” he said, laughing as he tried to flatten his hair again.

I had this odd feeling in my gut, like I was starting to worry that maybe Finn hung out with a lot of Upper Stream girls, and I was not special. The thought of him doing the same things with Chloe that he did with me made me feel sick.

“How did you two meet, then?” I asked once I could be sure I wouldn’t actually be sick all over the place.

“I used to help my dad out sometimes while I was still in school, and he had a job working on remodelling Chloe’s family’s kitchen a couple years ago,” Finn explained. “She snuck me my first taste of booze from her father’s liquor cabinet. Remember that?” he said to her, nudging her with his elbow.

“How does your father have a liquor cabinet?” I asked incredulously.

“You can have anything you want if you have enough money,” said Chloe, like it should have been obvious. “Any time enforcers catch you, you just pay the fine and continue. Not that they really care what we do, most of the time.” She laughed a little. “My dad’s actually bribed an enforcer _with_ alcohol, and it worked.”

“That’s corrupt!” I said.

“Of course it is. The whole system’s corrupt, Rae,” Finn replied. “Do you really think dividing human beings into streams is natural?”

“But, in school—” I began, then stopped myself. I wasn’t sure that I believed anything from school anymore. “I don’t know.”

“Come on,” he said, holding one of my hands and one of Chloe’s. “Let’s dance.”

***

“Finn, can I ask you something?” I said as I leaned against Finn on the sofa. It was Rest Day and I was spending the afternoon visiting him in his flat. (And not bowling with Archie, like my parents thought I was.)

“Please do,” he said, as though he couldn’t wait to educate me on something else.

“Have you got a girlfriend?” I asked. “Only, I’ve never heard you mention anyone, so I was wondering…”

“No, I haven’t got a girlfriend.” He rubbed his stubbly face in my hair and kissed the top of my head.

I picked up his hand with mine and interlaced our fingers. “But who are you going to marry when you turn eighteen?”

“Uh, no one, I guess,” he replied.

“You can do that?” I said, sitting up to look at him.

“Sure.”

“Have you ever had a girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But she decided she liked someone better than me and wanted to be his girlfriend instead.”

“I thought that once you picked a girlfriend or boyfriend, you had to keep them,” I said.

“Is that what you learned at school?” he teased.

“It’s just common knowledge. Or is that another thing that’s different for S3s?”

“I guess… I mean, technically, yeah, we’re supposed to keep them, but everyone switches so no one really cares.”

“So how come you never got a new girlfriend?”

He shrugged. “I did for a bit. But I never found anyone that interested me enough to keep them.”

“It’s too bad you can’t marry across streams,” I said offhandedly, but then got really embarrassed and wished I hadn’t.

“Are you saying you’d be my girlfriend if you could?” he asked. He sounded like he was teasing me.

“No… Just, you’d have more options…”

“I’m all right with never getting married. It’s not as though I want to have children, or anything.”

“Yeah, me and Archie are going to just pay the fine instead of having children, probably,” I said, resting my head back on his shoulder.

“You’re… still going to marry him?”

“I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

“Of course you have a choice, Rae. You always have a choice,” he said.

“Our parents are expecting us to get married, though.”

I could feel him shaking his head. “Don’t they also think you’re out with him right now instead of sitting here with me?”

“I suppose…” I said. “But it’s not like I can just lie and pretend to marry Archie—I’ll have to do it for real.”

“You’re sixteen. You earn your own money. Your parents don’t control you.”

“What are you suggesting? That I use my savings to rent a flat and live by myself, like you do?”

“Not necessarily…” he said. “But, look, it’s not like I’m held accountable to anyone, right? I do what I want.”

“I don’t think I could do that…”

“Why not?”

“My parents would be so mad…”

“So?”

“So, I care what they think,” I said. “If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be lying to them all the time lately…” I sat up again and leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees. “Am I just a terrible person?” I added as I stared at the floor.

“You’re not,” he said.

“If I really respected my parents, I wouldn’t be lying to them at all. I wouldn’t be doing anything I needed to lie about.”

“You could try telling them the truth,” he suggested, placing a hand on my back. “Maybe they’d understand.”

I let out a sarcastic laugh. “My dad hates the other streams, especially S3s. He thinks you all eat dog food.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“I know.” I dropped my face into my hands. “They’re so horrible and judgmental, so why do I even care what they think?”

“It’s normal to want to please your parents, I guess,” he said. “But it’s not worth it to please them if you can’t even enjoy your own life.”

“The point of life is not to enjoy it, though,” I said, looking over my shoulder at him.

He frowned at me. “Are you sure?”

“Life is about keeping things running smoothly. We’re all part of something bigger than ourselves. We have responsibilities.”

“Nah,” he said, leaning back and putting his hands behind his head. “That sounds like bullshit.”

“Maybe it’s just hard to see the big picture from down where you are,” I said.

He put his hands down slowly. “Excuse me?” he said, like he was mad at me. “From down where I am?”

“You know… You’re in the lowest stream,” I added. “You clean up other people’s rubbish for a living. I can imagine it’s hard to envision how you’re making a difference in the grand scheme of things.”

“Oh, well, it’s no moving numbers from one column to another, now, is it?” he replied as he stood up. “You think you’re better than me because you sit at a desk all day? Your work is just as trivial as mine—maybe even more so.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you—”

“That just makes it so much worse! You didn’t even realize how offensive you were being. Like it didn’t even register to you that I might not like that level of condescension directed at me.”

“I’m sorry…” I said. “I just mean, technically you’re below me in society, though, right? That’s not me being mean, that’s just how Streams works.”

“Is that how you think of me? Am I just an S3 to you? Am I not a person?”

“Of course you’re a person! You’re one of my favourite people in the world; the only people I care about are my family, Archie, and you.”

“But you think I’m less than you,” he said.

“I don’t! Look, my whole point was that everyone is important in the big picture, even S3s,” I tried to explain.

“And how condescending is that?”

“I—I don’t understand… How is what I’m saying a bad thing?”

“You know what, I don’t really want to talk about this anymore,” he said. “Maybe you should go home.”

“But—”

“I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

***

I didn’t see Finn at lunch the next day. He never came by my desk, so I went looking for him around the fourth floor, but couldn’t find him. I even tried Net-messaging him when I got home, but he didn’t respond. It was two more days before I ran into him again.

Well, I say, “ran into him,” but really he just came up behind me while I was eating lunch and scared the life out of me.

“Oh my gosh, Finn!” I said, turning around after I nearly spat water all over my computer when he said my name.

“I have a surprise for you,” he said, holding his hands behind his back.

“What is it?”

He held in front of me a key ring with a single key on it. “This,” he said.”

“A key…” I said slowly, wondering what in the world I would need a key for.

“I figured someone might notice if _all_ the file cabinets in the Archive were busted open, so I went into the Head of Department’s office and found this.”

“How’d you get into her office?”

“I have access to pretty much every room on this floor. It’s so I can clean and empty rubbish bins while no one’s around and they don’t have to actually see me.”

“So you stole a key?”

“I’m borrowing it.”

“And it opens the cabinets in the Archive?”

He smiled and raised his eyebrows. “Want to find out?”

I followed him cautiously to the Archive, where he unlocked the door with his barcode and let me in.

“So why exactly are you borrowing this key?” I asked as he headed straight to the far side of the Archive, where the oldest records were located.

“I thought we could look at some more files,” he said. “Perhaps we could even read what’s inside them. Because that whole ‘assignment’ thing has been on my mind since we saw those first files.”

“Me, too,” I said. “I mean, if people can be assigned into particular streams, then maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe… you could get assigned into Stream 2…”

He scoffed. “Why would I want to do that?”

“I just thought… If we were both S2s, then… Never mind.”

“You could always get assigned to Stream 3 instead,” he said after a minute.

I wanted to argue that I shouldn’t have to take a step down, but I figured he might think I was being condescending again. “Let’s just look at the files.”

He unlocked the first cabinet and pulled out a random file. “Henry Adams,” he said. “Age: Twenty-three. Location: Lincolnshire. Assignment: Stream 2.”

“Let me see,” I said, taking the file from his hands.

I opened the folder to find several pages. The top one was a form that had been filled in by hand, entitled “Application for Stream Assignment.”

“It looks like people applied to get reassigned, I guess,” I said. “I wonder if that’s still possible. I’ve never heard of such an application.”

“Here,” he said, putting the file back and pulling out another. “Check this one.”

I opened the next file without even reading the name, and found the same application form inside. “Are all these files for re-assignments?” I asked, looking around the Archive. It seemed like way too many, especially considering this was just for Lincolnshire.

“I don’t know,” he said when I handed the file back.

We checked another file from the next drawer down and it had the same form.

“I just wonder…” I said, trailing off as I wandered down the aisle a ways, until I was about a decade later. I pointed at one of the cabinets. “Check this one.”

Finn came over and unlocked the cabinet so I could take out a file.

“Theresa Levin,” I said. “Age: Thirteen. Location: Lincolnshire. Stream: 3.” I looked up at Finn. “It doesn’t say ‘assignment,’” I added.

“Does it have the application form?” he asked.

I opened the file, and there was a form on top, but it was not the same one. It was entitled, “Registration.” I remembered having to fill out a similar Net-form when I got registered at thirteen, as well, so I could get my barcode. Everyone had to do that.

“This is just a registration form,” I said to him. I flipped through the other pages, but they appeared to all be part of the same form. “There’s no application for re-assignment.”

“Try another,” he suggested.

I pulled out the next file, but it was the same. Just a registration form. We looked through half a dozen files from this particular year, and none were for re-assignment.

I was about to ask Finn what he thought it meant, when I heard the door to the Archive open.

“Oh, shit!” he whispered, pulling on my sleeve to bring me down to the floor with him quickly.

“Hello?” said someone from the doorway. “Is anyone in here?”

I tried not to breathe; I didn’t want to make any sound.

“Of course,” I heard the person grumble. “Goddamn S3s leaving all the lights on even when they’re not here.”

It went dark and the door closed again. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear Finn stand and close the cabinet drawer.

“This way,” he said, giving my sleeve another quick tug.

I followed the sound of his steps, trailing my hand along the cabinets so I wouldn’t bump into anything. When we reached the door, he opened it a sliver to check if there was anyone around before we left and went our separate ways.

***

My mother knew I hated seafood, yet every week she made some sort of fish for dinner. Tonight’s was salmon. (It was synthesized, of course, because salmon went extinct before I was born.) (It was still disgusting.)

“You’re not eating?” she asked me as I flaked off pieces of my dinner and scattered them around my plate.

“You know I hate fish,” I said.

“It’s good for you, Rae,” she said.

“I hate it anyway.”

“At least eat your vegetables.”

“They’ve been contaminated,” I said.

“And whose fault is that?”

“If she doesn’t want to eat, she doesn’t have to eat,” said my father.

“Don’t encourage her,” my mother said to him, like I wasn’t even there.

“Rae,” he said to me, apparently ignoring her. “How was work today?”

“Fine,” I said. “The same, I guess.”

“Well, it’s good to have something predictable, I always say,” he said.

“Yeah.” I stabbed one of my vegetables with my fork and contemplated eating it, but it smelled like salmon now, so I put it back. “Can I ask you something?” I said after a moment.

“Of course.”

“Have you ever heard of stream re-assignment?”

“Of what?” said my mother.

“Do you know if it’s possible to apply to get assigned to another stream?” I asked.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my father replied. “You’re born into a stream. No one gets assigned. And you certainly can’t move from one stream to another.”

“Do you want to move to another stream?” she said, looking worried.

“No, I was just wondering if it was possible,” I said. “Like if there was an application form that existed somewhere.”

“Certainly not,” he said.

“What about in the past?” I said. “Could people have been assigned back then?”

He set his fork down and looked at me. “The first generation were assigned, I suppose, but that was over five hundred years ago. And I’m pretty sure once they were assigned, that was it. There was no moving from one to another.”

“I mean more recently than that. In the past century, for example.”

“Where did you get this idea?” he said. “Is this the kind of nonsense kids are being taught in school these days? Or is someone you work with a prankster?”

“It’s nothing, I was just wondering,” I said.

“You shouldn’t be wondering about that sort of thing,” my mother added.

“Yes, I hope you haven’t been asking anyone else about this,” said my father. “Other people might think you’re mad.”

“You don’t think that, do you?” I asked.

“We don’t think you’re mad,” she said. “It’s normal to be curious about things, just… don’t be too curious.”

“What’s too curious?”

“When you start to question the authority of the state—or of your parents—you’re too curious,” he said.

“I’m not questioning anyone’s authority, I’m just wondering if there’s something they’re not telling us.”

“Like if it’s possible to be assigned into a different stream?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not, Rae. That’s it.”

“All right,” I said, looking down at my plate. “I got it.”

***

Finn and I went back to the Archive every day at lunch to make our way through the first few years of files, and a definite pattern emerged. The first two years took up several cabinets, and all the files we looked at had Application for Stream Assignment forms. After that point, the number of files per year decreased, and they all contained Registration forms.

“This is kind of weird, right?” said Finn as he flipped open another file folder.

“Yeah,” I said distractedly. I wasn’t really paying attention to the files anymore. “Are you mad at me?”

“Why do you think I’m mad at you?”

“Because you haven’t made physical contact with me in over a week.”

“Oh.” He closed the file in his hand but didn’t look at me. “I thought maybe you didn’t want me to.”

“Why wouldn’t I want you to?”

“Because I’m beneath you, apparently.” He finally looked at me and I could tell he was mad.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” I said desperately.

“What other way is there to mean it?” he said. “Look, I didn’t think you bought into all that streamist bullshit about S3s being inferior to the upper streams, but apparently you do.”

“I don’t think you’re inferior!”

“Really? You don’t think that your work is better than mine? That your education is better than mine? That your lifestyle is better than mine?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I think your work is just as necessary as mine, I think you’re the smartest person I know, and I think you live the kind of life I wish I could.”

His expression softened. “You do?”

I nodded.

“You could, you know,” he said. “You could live the kind of life I do.”

“I don’t know how,” I said.

“You just have to stop giving a fuck what other people think.”

“I feel like that’s easier said than done.”

He shrugged before opening the file in his hand again. “We should ask someone about these assignment forms,” he said.

“Like who?” I asked.

“I’m not sure…”

“Hold it open for a second,” I said as I pulled my mobile out of my pocket. I used it to take a photo of the form, so we’d be able to show it to somebody if we needed to. I synced it to my Net-photos, just in case.

“Good thinking,” he said, smiling.

I slipped my phone back into my pocket before putting my hand around the back of his neck, pulling him in for a kiss. He let the file slip from his hand as he wrapped his arms around me, and it fell to the floor.

“You’re not beneath me,” I said quietly once our lips parted.

He kissed me again, but stopped suddenly when we heard the Archive door open. There were footsteps this time, and we knew we were going to be discovered, but Finn hurried to pick up the file and put it back so at least we wouldn’t get caught snooping through locked cabinets.

He wasn’t quite quick enough, however, and the maker of the footsteps came around the corner and spotted us just as Finn was closing up the drawer.

“Rae? What are you doing in here?” she said. It was Olivia, my supervisor.

“Um, I was just, uh…”I began, not sure what I could possibly say in this situation.

“It’s my fault,” Finn said quickly. “I wanted to show her the Archive; she didn’t do anything!”

“You’re both going to have to come with me,” she said. “The Head of Department can deal with you.”

We silently followed Olivia out of the Archive and towards the Head of Department’s office. She wasn’t in at the moment, so we waited in a couple of the chairs outside her door. When the Head finally got back from lunch, Olivia told her all about how she had caught us in the Archive.

“You,” said the Head, addressing Finn, “you shouldn’t have been in there until next week when the movers come. And you,”—she turned to me—“you shouldn’t have been in there at all.”

“Like I said before, it’s my fault,” said Finn. “It was my idea to go in there, it was my idea to borrow the key,”—he pulled the key out of his pocket and placed it on the desk—“and it was my idea to look through the files. Rae didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Nonetheless, I’m afraid I’m going to have to terminate you and suspend her,” she said. “Fraternizing outside your stream is grounds for termination, so she’s lucky to get away with a one-month suspension.”

“Wait, I’m getting fired for being friends with her?” he asked incredulously.

“ _You’re_ getting terminated for theft and trespassing, since you’ve decided to shoulder all the blame” she said to him, “and _she’s_ getting suspended for fraternization.”

“That’s bullshit!”

“Watch your language! You’re lucky I don’t get the enforcers involved.”

“But—”

“I think that’s enough, Mr. Nelson.” She turned to her computer and told it to call security to come deal with us.

A couple of security personnel arrived within minutes and escorted us down to the ground level, where we were scanned to remove our clearance to the building, and then taken outside.

“Is that it?” Finn said to me, looking back at the building. “We’re done? Just like that?”

“I guess so,” I said, though I was still a little bit in shock. Had I seriously just been suspended for _fraternization_?

***

“Fraternization?” my father said, holding out his mobile as if to show me the message on it. He kept waving it around, though, so I couldn’t actually read of it, but I got the idea. “You got suspended for _fraternization_?”

“It’s stupid, right?” I said as I sat on the sofa with my arms crossed looking up at him.

“No, Rae, _you’re_ the one being stupid if you thought it was a good idea to socialize at work with someone outside your stream,” he said. “Please tell me it was at least an S1…”

I pinched my mouth shut and looked at the floor.

“You’ve got to be kidding me, Rae!”

“Sorry, I just didn’t know it was that big of a deal!” I said.

“Of course it’s a big deal,” he said. “You’ve been taught your whole life not to do it; you knew it was wrong, but you did it anyway.”

“Why is it wrong, though?”

He looked like he couldn’t believe I would ask such a thing, so I turned to my mother, who was sitting in the armchair across the room and trying not to get involved.

“They’re still people, aren’t they?” I added.

“Yes, they’re people, but they’re a different type of people.”

“How so?”

“How so?” He seemed like he was going to blow a fuse. “They just are! That’s the nature of Streams; people from different streams are fundamentally different! That’s it!”

“Listen, darling,” my mother finally said to him, “why don’t you let me talk to her for a minute, all right?”

My father was seething, but took a couple of breaths and left the room. My mother came and sat next to me on the sofa.

“How did you meet him?” she asked me.

“Who?” I said.

“The S3 boy you’ve been socializing with.”

“How do you know it’s a boy?”

“Look, I understand where you’re coming from, Rae,” she said. “You’re at an age where you’re going to pay more attention to boys; you may even be starting to worry about your choice of boyfriend, as your marriage looms ever closer. So it’s normal for your eyes to wander.

“When I first married your father and we moved here, I developed a fascination with the postman at the time. He was nice-looking and well-mannered for an S3, I thought, and I’d say hello when I saw him. I did a lot of Net-shopping while I was on maternity rest with your sister just so he’d have a reason to come to the house.

“Sometimes I even thought about inviting him in to chat—I was quite lonely, being home with nobody but an infant all day—but I knew that would be wrong,” she continued. “Not only would I be betraying my stream, but I’d be betraying my husband by forming a bond with another man.

“So what I’m saying is that it’s normal to want to befriend different people, but that doesn’t mean you should. Even if you don’t care about protocol, Rae, you do care about Archie, don’t you? Think about how he would feel if he knew you had become friends with another boy, from another stream, no less.”

“Okay…” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that Archie already knew, and that he’d become “friends” with boys from other streams, too.

***

“Rae,” Finn said when he opened the door to his flat. He seemed surprised to see me. “What are you doing here?”

“I… don’t know,” I said. I had just taken the bus to his place after my parents fell asleep, because I didn’t know what else to do. I just knew I couldn’t stay home. “Am I disrupting you?” I asked when I realized he was wearing a vest top and pyjama bottoms and his sofa was in its bed position, like he was just about to go to sleep.

“No, no, come on in.” He stepped aside to let me in and took my jacket from me to hang on a hook behind the door.

“I know I probably shouldn’t be here, because spending time with you is what got me suspended from my job,” I said. “But I haven’t seen you in a few days, and I’m going mad at home by myself. I don’t have a fascination with the postman, unfortunately.”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Rae, you know I’m fine with you coming over,” he said. “Just maybe shoot me a message first. I’d have put on real trousers.”

“I don’t mind,” I said with a smile.

“Can I make you some tea?” he asked as he stood awkwardly with his arms folded.

“Um, yeah, okay…” It seemed a bit late to be drinking tea, but I wasn’t ready to go to sleep yet anyway. “How’d your parents take the news of your termination?” I asked as he went to put on the kettle.

“They weren’t thrilled,” he said. “But my dad’s got me some work with him until I can find something more permanent. How about you?”

“Well, my dad was really ticked off. I think about the ‘fraternization’ more than the suspension, though,” I said. “And my mom just told me this weird story about how she used to want to chat with the postman, but didn’t because it would be wrong and she’d be betraying my father. What the heck does that even mean?”

“I guess that depends what she meant by ‘chat,’” he said. I frowned at him in confusion, but he just added, “Never mind.”

“Anyway, I’d really like to change careers, after this whole suspension thing. I’ve been looking at jobs for the past several days, but it seems like all the first-year trainee positions are full.”

“It’s too bad you can’t apply for jobs out of your stream, either.”

I looked at him like that was the most absurd thing I’d ever heard.

“I’m just saying, an S3 job is better than no job, right?”

“I suppose…” I said. I had to tread lightly because I didn’t want to accidentally insult him again.

“I’m sure you’ll find something, though,” he said.

“Maybe… Though, I have to say, it makes me glad I don’t live on my own,” I said. “No offence, because I know it works for you, but I don’t know what I would do if I had no job and no one to depend on. At least by following the rules, I’ve got my parents now, and I’ll have Archie in the future… I’ll never have to do it all alone. It’s not just about the money, either, but the emotional support, you know?”

“Just because I live on my own doesn’t mean I don’t get emotional support from my family and friends.”

“Oh.”

“And, unlike you, I don’t have to lie to my parents about the things I choose to do; they’re there for me no matter what.”

“You think mine aren’t there for me?” I said in disbelief.

“They don’t even know where you are right now!” he said.

“Are you saying that I should go home? That you don’t want me here?”

“Of course I want you here, Rae. I always want you here.” He reached out and held onto my arms, which I’d crossed, trying to open them so that he could hug me. “Come on,” he said with a laugh. “Quit being so stubborn.”

I sighed, but released and let him hug me.

“I really like you,” he said into my ear. “More than anyone else.”

“What about your emotionally-supportive family and friends?” I asked.

“They don’t mean shit compared to you.” He drew back to look at me and smiled like he was just teasing. “Okay, not really, but I like you in a different way. I’m not morally obligated to like you—in fact, I’m not supposed to like you at all.”

“Yeah, but when does that ever stop you from doing something?” I said, putting my hands around the back of his neck. “You do whatever you want.”

“That’s not true,” he said, his smile fading. “I don’t want to feel this way about you. I don’t want to miss you any time you’re not with me. I don’t want to think about you all the time.”

“But you do?”

He nodded slightly.

I smiled a little. The idea that he couldn’t stop thinking about me made me strangely happy. “So… What does this mean?”

“I don’t know…” he said. “But I think the kettle’s done.”

I let him go and he poured the boiling water over the tea bags in a couple of mismatched mugs. Watching him pour the water so carefully just made me think how much I liked him, too.

He was unlike anyone I’d ever known, though, and my feelings for him were unlike any I’d ever felt. There was fondness and caring and respect in there. But also desire; wanting. Wanting to be near him always. Wanting to erase all the distance between us. I couldn’t get enough of him. Was it greed, too? (Maybe I was just a horrible person.)

It was hard to stand this close—within arm’s reach—and not touch him. I reached out and stroked him on the shoulder, and he looked over at me like he thought I was trying to get his attention.

“Yeah?” he said, setting the kettle back down.

“Nothing,” I said. I gripped him and pulled him closer. The greed was overpowering me.

“What’s up?” he added with a smile.

“I just… want you,” I said before kissing him.

He put his arms around me and held me nearer as I ran my fingers through his hair. His hands made their way up the back of my t-shirt and my skin felt electrified wherever he touched me. I pressed forward against him and he leaned back on the kitchen counter.

He started to lift my shirt over my head; I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just raised my arms and he pulled it the rest of the way off before dropping it on the floor. Then he took a step forward, reached behind his neck, and removed his vest top over his head as well.

I let my hands trail down his chest and abdomen and wondered if his skin felt electrified when I touched him, too. He held onto my shoulders as he urged me backwards towards the sofa bed, still kissing me. He started to unfasten my jeans, so I took them off before getting into the bed, and he followed, climbing on top of me.

I could feel him pressing against me, through his pyjama bottoms. He was ready, and I was ready. It was time.

“Finn,” I said quietly into his ear. “You’ve got contraceptives, right?”

***

“So we completely forgot about our tea last night, didn’t we?” Finn said when he went over to the kitchen-wall of his flat. He dumped two cold, over-steeped mugs of tea into the sink.

“I guess we were a bit distracted,” I replied with a laugh as I pulled on my jeans.

He picked up my t-shirt off the floor and tossed it to me. It felt pretty gross to put it back on, but I needed something to wear home.

“Do you want breakfast?” he asked. “I can make toast—well, I don’t have a toaster, so it’s really just bread.”

“I should get home before my parents worry too much,” I said. “I’m sure they’re probably freaking out already that I’m not there.”

“Then what’s an extra ten minutes?” he said. “Or twenty.” He flicked his eyebrows up.

“Tempting,” I said with a laugh, “but I should really go.”

“Hold on, I’ll get dressed and walk you to the bus.”

“You don’t have to—”

“It’ll take two seconds,” he said as he opened a dresser drawer and pulled out a pair of jeans. He’d just finished fastening them when there was a knock at the door.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“I don’t know…” He grabbed a t-shirt from the drawer as well and threw it on before answering the door.

Two men in enforcer uniforms stepped into the flat, holding up their enforcement IDs.

“We got a report of suspicious activity in this residence,” said the larger of the two. “Put your hands in the air with your barcodes clearly visible.”

Finn put up his hands and turned to look at me. “It’s okay, Rae, just do what they tell you.”

I raised my hands, too, and the second man came and scanned my wrist. “She’s an S2,” he told his associate. “Sixteen.”

“He’s an S3, as we suspected,” said the first one after scanning Finn. “Search the premises.”

“You can put your hands down now,” the second guy said to me quietly. “You’re not in trouble. Just stand aside while we search the place and then we’ll take you home.”

I wanted to argue, but I was too afraid to contradict an enforcer.

He took a look around, searching through all the cabinets and drawers, and even the bathroom. It didn’t take long; it was such a tiny flat. “Alcohol,” he said to the larger man, holding up the things he’d found. “Contraceptives. And cocaine.”

“That’s clearly baking soda!” Finn interjected. “Why would I keep cocaine in the refrigerator?”

“That’s for the lab to figure out.”

“Finn Nelson,” said the first man, grabbing Finn’s wrists and holding them behind his back, “you’re under arrest for possession of contraband materials and corruption of a minor.”

“But I’m a minor!” said Finn, though he didn’t struggle. It was as though he knew struggling would make it worse.

“Ask her if she’d like to charge him with sexual assault, too.”

“What?” I said. “No! He didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Did he engage in sexual activities with you?” the smaller one asked me.

I looked over at Finn who was shaking his head at me. “No…” I said uncertainly.

“Miss Earl, an S1 or S2 cannot legally consent to sexual activity with an S3,” he said, like he was trying to be supportive. “It’s assault.”

“I told you, he didn’t do anything!”

“Just take her home,” the first man said. “I’ll take care of this one.” He clamped his hand down on Finn’s shoulder, causing him to bow under the pressure.

“Sure thing,” said the other one. “Come on,” he said to me, touching me on the back.

I jerked away from him and rushed over to Finn. “I’ll come get you, okay?” I said to him before I gave him a kiss.

“All right,” said the large man as he pulled Finn away from me. “Get out of here before I charge you with obstruction.”

I got my shoes and jacket from the door, and the second enforcer escorted me out of the building. “What’s going to happen to him?” I asked when I got to the car outside.

“He’ll be detained until his trial, unless he makes bail,” he said. “But S3s never make bail…”

“And what about the trial? What happens after that?”

“If he’s found guilty, he’ll get sentenced; probably community service, if it’s his first offence.”

“Okay…” I said, though I wasn’t certain that it was Finn’s first offence. He seemed too comfortable with the whole situation, like he’d done it before…


	3. Part Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Finn is arrested in his flat, Rae tries to find a way to help him.

“Rae!” my mother said when she saw me standing at the door with an enforcer. “What’s going on?” She seemed panicked.

“We found your daughter in the residence of an S3 this morning,” said the enforcer.

“Oh my gosh! Is she all right? Is she in trouble?”

“I’m just here to make sure she got home safely,” he said.

“What is this?” said my father when he came to the door as well. “Rae, what have you done?”

“It’s nothing, darling,” my mother told him, trying to calm him down.

“There’s an enforcer at my house; it’s not nothing!” he said loudly. “And you,” he added to me, “where have you been all night?”

“Out,” I said with my arms folded.

“I’ll leave her with you now,” said the enforcer. “But I’d advise you talk to her about the dangers of socializing with S3s.”

“Oh, we will,” my father said.

I followed my parents into the house as the enforcer left and they immediately started in on me.

“What were you thinking, Rae?” my father shouted at me. “After you got suspended for fraternization, you go off and pull a stunt like this?”

“Sorry,” I muttered.

“Are you really? Because you don’t sound sorry to me!”

“I am,” I said louder. “I’m sorry I got caught and I’m sorry that made you mad. But I’m not going to apologize for wanting to spend time with my friend—he’s just been arrested because of me, by the way!”

“You can’t be friends with an S3,” he said. “And if he tricked you into thinking he was your friend, he deserves to be arrested.”

“Tricked me? How would he have tricked me, exactly?”

“They’re liars, Rae. They will say whatever they have to in order to get what they want.”

“Look, I know this is important,” my mother said, tapping him on the shoulder, “but we really need to get to work.”

He looked at her and then back at me. “We’re not done discussing this,” he said. “And you’re not leaving this house until your suspension from work is up. Got it?”

I nodded silently.

***

As soon as I was sure my parents were long gone, I left the house and headed straight for the nearest banking kiosk to withdraw as much money from my savings as I was allowed before taking the bus down to the Enforcement Building.

There was a woman standing inside the doors who asked to scan my barcode, probably to make sure I wasn’t a wanted criminal. After she let me through, I walked up to a young man sitting in a booth that appeared to be the reception area—or whatever it was called in the Enforcement Building. I figured he might know what the heck I was supposed to do.

“Um, hi,” I said as I approached the window of the booth.

He glanced up from his computer for a second before returning his attention to it. “What do you want?” he asked brusquely.

“Uh, my friend was just arrested this morning,” I said, “and I’m here to bail him out, I guess.”

“Name?”

“Pardon?”

“What’s your friend’s name?” he said.

“Oh, uh, Finn Nelson.”

He typed something into the computer before adding, “His bail’s set at one thousand points.”

“Okay,” I said. That was nearly all the money I had with me, but it was worth it.

“Barcode,” he said, turning towards me and pointing at the scanner below the window.

“I was going to pay with cash,” I said as I took the wad of money out of my pocket and held it up.

“I still need to scan your ID.”

“Why?”

“You’re responsible for your friend showing up to his trial, now,” he said, like it was the most tedious thing in the world to explain it to me. “He doesn’t show up and we come for you. Got it?”

I nodded, though I didn’t like the sound of that. I scanned my barcode anyway, and he gave me a suspicious look—he must have noticed that I was an S2 coming to bail out an S3. But he didn’t say anything as I handed over the cash.

He typed a few more things into the computer. “Your friend will be out in a couple of hours.”

“What am I supposed to do until then?” I asked.

“Does it look like I care?” he said without looking at me.

“All right,” I said, taking a step back. “Thanks for your help.”

I found a bench outside the building to sit on while I waited for Finn. I checked the time on my mobile every couple of minutes for nearly two hours before he showed up.

“Rae,” he said as he walked up to me. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I paid your bail,” I said, standing up.

“You shouldn’t have done that, either. Now you’re responsible if—”

“If you don’t show up for your trial, I know. I trust you.” I reached out to touch his arm but he pulled away.

“We can’t talk here,” he said. “Meet me at Eden’s Park in an hour.”

***

Eden’s Park was about half way between my house and Finn’s flat, so it seemed like a good neutral meeting ground. I was afraid of going back to his flat in case he got in trouble again, and I didn’t think he was going to invite me back any time soon anyway.

I found Finn sitting on a bench in the park when I got there, and I took a seat, leaving a large space between us.

“I’m sorry about everything,” he said, staring down at his shoes.

“It’s all right,” I said.

“No, it’s not all right. This whole situation is bullshit,” he added. “If I were an S1, I would have just been fined for possession of contraband and that would be it.”

“But you’re not an S1…”

“Yeah, but why am I not an S1?”

“I… don’t understand.”

“What makes me an S3 instead of an S1?” he said.

“Um, your career, I guess,” I said.

“And what if I were a business owner?”

“You can’t be; you’re an S3.”

“That’s my point. My career determines my stream, but my stream determines my career. How does that make sense?”

“You’re just born into it,” I said.

“But how come I’m expected to have an S3 career just because my parents did? I could be really good at something else,” he said. “I know an S3 who is great at drawing, for example, but she’ll never get to be an artist because ‘creator’ is an S1 career. Even though she has the skills and talent for it, she’ll never get to do it. Is that fair?”

“How can she be great at drawing if she’s S3, though?”

“Because the streams are meaningless, Rae! This is what I’m saying!”

“So, you’re saying there’s no real difference between an S1 and an S3?” I said. “Except that we call one an S1 and the other an S3?”

“Exactly.”

“Then why do we do it?”

“Because that’s how it’s been done for five hundred years, I guess,” he said.

“Yeah… But what if it’s not?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if it’s been less than a hundred years?” I said. “What if all those application forms were not for stream re-assignment but were actually the first stream assignments ever? It would mean that everything we’d been taught in Science and History about how Streams is natural, how it happened over hundreds of years… It was all lies.”

“It would mean that, yes,” he said.

“And if everything about Streams is a lie,” I continued, “then how can we believe anything else we’ve been taught?” I looked over at him and he was smiling at me. “What?” I said self-consciously.

“I like it when you question authority,” he said.

“Yeah, well, maybe authority’s not above questioning after all…”

“Can you meet me here tomorrow?” he added, still smiling. “I have an idea.”

***

I waited for my parents to leave for work the next day before I headed out to Eden’s Park again. I wandered around the park looking for Finn, but couldn’t find him, so I sat on a bench to wait. (The bench we’d sat on yesterday was taken, unfortunately.)

I spotted him approaching from halfway across the park, carrying a knapsack on his shoulders. He shrugged off the bag when he came and sat down, setting it on the bench between us.

“What’s this for?” I asked.

“My idea,” he said.

“What’s your idea?”

“I’m going to go to London.”

“What?”

“And I want you to come with me,” he added.

“You’re joking, right?”

He shook his head.

“Why would I go to London with you?” I said.

“What you were saying yesterday, about how maybe everything we learned about Streams is a lie,” he said. “It reminded me of this rumour I’d heard that there’s an underground resistance group in London claiming the same thing.”

I stared at him blankly for a moment. “You want to go to London because of a _rumour_? Not just a rumour, but a rumour about what is probably illegal activity?”

“Yes.”

“And you expect me to go with you?”

“Yes.”

“You know that sounds mad, right?”

“Yes.”

“What about your trial?” I asked seriously.

“Look, I’d rather go underground than go to prison, all right?” he said. “But I want you with me.”

“I can’t just leave! What about my parents? What about Archie? They’ll wonder what happened to me!”

“Leave them a note.”

“And what do you expect us to do once we get to London?”

“Join the resistance,” he said. “I found out where they are supposedly located.”

“And then what?” I said.

“And then we take down the system.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Are you serious?”

“Of course I’m serious,” he said with a smile that made it unclear if he was actually being serious.

“How do we take down the system, exactly?”

“I’m not sure. I figured that’s what the resistance is for. They’ll know what to do.”

“This is ridiculous,” I said. I was still laughing, mostly because I was starting to actually consider it. I was sick of my life the way it was—I was sick of my job (from which I was still suspended), I was sick of living with my parents, I was sick of following the rules.

“Ridiculous can be good,” he replied.

“I suppose so…”

***

Finn and I took the bus back to my house so that I could pack up a bag of essentials and leave a note for my parents—it was hard to find a scrap of paper to write it on, but I didn’t want to leave a digital trail. I told them to give my regards to Archie, as well. I was going to miss them all, but I wasn’t going to miss this place.

We went over to the banking kiosk to withdraw as much cash as we could. We weren’t sure how long it was going to have to last us, but we couldn’t use our credit or they’d track us.

I was nervous on the bus ride to the train station, but Finn held my hand reassuringly. We bought our tickets and I waited on the platform anxiously. I wasn’t sure why he seemed so calm about uprooting his entire life.

It wasn’t until we were on the train that I really started to freak out, though. I’d never left Lincolnshire before, let alone left in order to evade the law. What was I thinking?

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, as if he could tell what was going through my mind. “I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”

I gave him a tight-lipped smile. I didn’t know how he could promise me such a thing. Neither of us knew what we were getting into, did we?

I was especially nervous when our tickets got inspected, like I was afraid they would reveal that we were runaways. But it was fine. The rest of the trip was fine, in fact, until we approached London itself. There was an announcement that all passengers entering London would have to have their IDs scanned, as London was a controlled city. I started to panic.

He squeezed my hand. “It’s okay,” he said, though he didn’t sound as sure of himself as before. “Just follow me.”

He stayed in his seat for a few seconds before getting up and walking to the back of the car. I followed and he led me into the toilet, closing the door behind us. It was cramped with both of us in there.

“Are we just going hide from—” I began.

“Shh! Keep your voice down,” he said quietly.

“Sorry.” I tried to hold my breath—it felt like I was breathing too loudly—but I couldn’t do it for long.

I could heard Finn breathing as well. It wasn’t slow and steady like it usually was; it was quick and anxious. I put my hand on his chest and felt his heart racing.

“What?” he said, looking down at my hand.

“Are you scared?” I asked.

“Yeah, I’m scared.”

I was surprised. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him scared before, not even while he was being arrested in his home.

I moved my hand up to the side of his face and stroked it with my thumb in what I hoped was a comforting manner. He turned his head slightly and kissed the inside of my wrist, right on my barcode.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“What for?”

“Being with me.”

***

When we arrived in London, Finn and I got back to our seats to pick up our bags, confident that we’d missed the ID inspection—and we did, thankfully—before disembarking. The station was so much bigger than the one at home, or any I’d ever seen.

Finn asked someone how to get to Great Portland Street, which was apparently the closest Tube station to the resistance group’s rumoured home base. It was close enough for us to walk there.

“I think this is it,” Finn said as we stopped in front of a dingy-looking café.

“It looks empty in there,” I said, peering in through the window.

“That’s because it’s not really a café, right?”

“I guess…”

He took my hand in his as we walked inside. There was one customer, drinking coffee in the corner and reading something on his mobile, and two young baristas—a boy and a girl—behind the counter who looked to be about our ages. I noticed they were both wearing thick red bands on their left wrists.

“What can I get for you today?” the girl asked cheerfully.

“Uh, we were actually hoping to apply for a job,” Finn said, which was supposedly the code message to let them know we were looking to join the resistance.

“What makes you qualified?” the boy asked, folding his arms like he was trying to be a tough guy.

Finn looked worried. He mustn’t have known the rest of the script.

“We’re fugitives!” I blurted out.

The boy looked at the girl and chuckled before turning back to us. He motioned with his head for us to follow him around back. “What stream are you?” he asked as he led us down a corridor and through to a storage room.

“We’ve renounced our streams,” said Finn, trying to sound confident.

The boy seemed to like that answer. “All right,” he said. “We’re always looking to recruit new baristas. Assuming you have something to offer us.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What have you got that would make you an asset to our mission?” he replied. “Which is to serve coffee, of course.” He smiled sarcastically.

“We just want to join; is that not enough?”

“We’ve got a photo!” Finn said quickly. “Possible evidence of massive subterfuge.”

“Hmm.” The boy looked mildly impressed. “Can I see it?”

Finn looked at me as if to say it was okay to show the photo of the application form.

I opened the photo on my mobile and held it out to show the boy.

“Come back just before closing and we’ll take it to The Boss for consideration,” he said after a moment of inspecting the photo.

“Great, thank you,” said Finn.

“What’s your name, by the way?” the boy added before we could leave.

“Finn.”

“Chop,” the boy said as he shook Finn’s hand. He turned to me. “And you are?”

“Rae,” I said timidly.

He shook my hand as well. “I look forward to working with both of you.”

***

I wandered around the area with Finn, stopping to buy a sandwich for dinner since we hadn’t eaten all day, before we returned to the café just as it was about to close.

“Hey, you came back,” said Chop when we got inside. He went behind us and locked up the front door, and I felt trapped. “I wasn’t sure you guys were serious about this.”

“We don’t joke around when it comes to coffee,” I said sarcastically.

“That’s good to hear. Come on.” He led us back down the corridor and through the storage room to a door, which he unlocked with a physical key.

We followed him through to the next room, which looked like a small, open-plan office. There were desks with computers around the room and a bigger table in the middle that just had several chairs around it. Some of the chairs were occupied.

The girl from earlier in the café was there, along with a handful of other people I’d never seen before. Chop brought us towards the table and introduced us to everyone.

The girl, that was Izzy; the young man with the glasses next to her was Alistair; the two young women on the other side of the table were Lydia and Kat—I wasn’t sure which was which, though; and the older man at the head of the table was apparently just known as “The Boss.” They were all wearing those thick red bands.

“This isn’t everyone,” Chop told us. “Some people are out on a job right now.”

“What kind of job?” I asked.

He smiled condescendingly at me. “That’s classified information, sweetheart.”

“Chop,” said The Boss. “Why have you brought me these two?”

“They’ve got an interesting photo, sir,” Chop replied. He turned to me and added, “Show him!”

I quickly got my mobile out to show him the photo. The Boss took it from my hand as I approached him to take a good look at it.

“And what do they want for this photo?” he asked Chop.

“I think they want to join us.”

The Boss looked at Finn and me for a moment. “All right. Get them geared up,” he said. Then he turned to me and added, “Do you mind if I save this?”

“That’s fine,” I said

He got up and went over to one of the computers and tapped my mobile to the scanner to transfer the file. “You,” he said to Lydia (or Kat) when he was finished, “chuck this.” He tossed her my mobile and she took it over to a bin in the corner and started breaking it into pieces.

“Hey!” I rushed over to try and stop her, but it was too late. “What the heck was that for?”

“Enforcers can trace your mobile; you could have led them right to us,” said The Boss. He looked at Finn expectantly.

Finn sighed but pulled out his mobile and handed it over to be smashed.

“Chop, get them disposables,” The Boss added.

Chop went over to a box full of cheap-looking mobiles and pulled out two of them to give to us. “You keep these for a month, then you destroy them and get new ones, yeah?” he explained.

Finn and I nodded.

Izzy suddenly appeared in front of us, holding two red wristbands. “For your barcodes,” she said with a smile.

“From now on, you do not use your barcode,” The Boss said. “You will work for us and get paid in cash. I’m assuming you brought some cash with you?”

I nodded again. “Some.”

“There’s a hotel nearby that’s cheap and doesn’t check ID; you can stay there for a while.”

“Okay, but when you say we’ll work for you,” Finn said, “what does that mean?”

“New recruits work in the café,” The Boss explained.

“Isn’t that just a front?” I asked.

“Yes, but it only works as a front if we keep it running.”

“So we’re going to fight the system by making people coffee?” Finn said, clearly unimpressed.

“For starters. We have all sort of jobs to be done around the city, though, so once you’ve proven your loyalty you might get to do something a bit more fun.” The Boss smiled but it looked sadistic, like he was enjoying the frightened looks of regret on our faces.

Finn reached his hand towards me and I held it, which made me feel a bit better. We were in this together.

***

It was late by the time Finn and I left our first meeting with the resistance group, but the nearby hotel that was mentioned had twenty-four hour check-in, so we were able to go and get a room even at this time of night.

“I’m gonna need a six-hundred-point deposit from you before you get your key,” the man at the front desk said gruffly.

“What for?” Finn asked.

“It’s to make sure you don’t stiff me,” the man said. He glanced at the band on Finn’s wrist. “It’s either that or I scan your ID and the enforcers can deal with you if you try to run off without paying.” (He sure knew what to say to get us to co-operate.)

“It’s fine, Finn, I’ll pay it,” I said. I counted out some cash from my pocket and handed it over to the man.

“And here’s your room key,” he said, holding up a physical key for one of us to take. “Enjoy your stay.”

Finn took the key, which had a tag attached to it that showed the number of our room on the second floor. The room was small and dingy, but I wasn’t expecting much for the price. It had a bed and a bathroom and a charging station for our mobiles. Plus I saw that there was a communal kitchenette on the ground floor. What more did we need in the short term, really?

“This is… quaint,” I said as I walked around the room.

“It’s a shit hole, Rae,” said Finn.

“It’s just temporary, until we start making enough money to rent something, yeah?”

“By working in a fake café?”

“That’s also temporary.”

“This is just… not what I was expecting,” he said, taking a seat on the end of the bed.

I stood in front of him and placed my hands on his shoulders. “What were you expecting?”

“Something less… corporate, I suppose.”

“You mean with the café as a front?”

“The café, the desks, the hierarchy. It just… It doesn’t feel all that different from working within Streams, does it?”

“There’s only so much they can do while the system is still the way it is, right?” I said. “They still need money to live. They still need organization to get things done.”

“I wasn’t expecting them to be… so organized…” He smiled a little after he said it, like he realized it sounded kind of stupid. “I know that’s not exactly a bad thing, but I thought maybe they would need us more than we would need them.”

“We just have to show them how much they need us.”

“And how do we do that?” he asked, slipping his arms around me so that his hands were on the small of my back.

“I don’t know, exactly,” I said as I rubbed his shoulders.

“It’s too bad we don’t still have access to the Archive,” he said. “We could do more research and really build a case for this whole Streams-is-a-lie thing.”

I stopped what I was doing; I had an idea. “When you said the Archive was being moved to a central repository… do you know where that is?”

“The Paramount Building, here in London,” he said.

“So, in theory, we could…”

He looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to finish even though I thought I was being obvious.

“We could find a way to break in there and access the files,” I said.

“What, like a heist?” he said as he smiled up at me like he thought I was adorable for even trying.

“Never mind…”

“No, I like it,” he added. “I’m not sure how we’d do it, though, but it’s possible the others might know of a way.”

“I suppose we can bring it up at the next meeting,” I said.

“Yeah…” He held onto my back as he pulled himself up before spinning me around and pushing me gently onto the bed.

I laughed a little as he climbed on top of me.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Stay here. With me.”

“Yes.”

“Because you could go home, if you wanted. If this is too much for you.”

“I can handle it,” I said. “Besides, I’m in trouble if you don’t show up for your court date, too, so I have no incentive to go back.”

“You’ll just get a fine, though,” he said. “It’ll be so much worse if they catch us here.”

“Then we’ll just have to make sure they don’t catch us.”

***

“You’re late,” Chop said when Finn and I got to the café the next morning.

“Yeah, sorry,” said Finn. “The alarm on my mobile didn’t go off, so we slept in and—”

“I don’t care, just come on.”

The place was empty except for him and Izzy at the counter, so we didn’t have to be discreet as we followed him around back. We got to the group’s headquarters and I recognized a couple of the people there from last night, but there were some new folks as well. Chop didn’t introduce us this time, though. Instead he took us straight to Alistair, who was sitting at one of the computer desks.

“You’re late,” he said when he looked up at us.

“Sorry about that,” Finn began, “we just—”

“Never mind. Let’s just get this over with,” said Alistair as he stood up. “These computers all have Net access, but they require a manual login. You’ll be given that info after your probationary period is up.”

“Probationary period?” I asked, following him around the room.

“As new recruits, there’s a two-week probationary period before you get full access to our resources.”

“Two weeks?” said Finn. “How are we supposed to help if we’re not even given access to anything?”

“You’ll be too busy slinging coffee, mate,” said Alistair. “You won’t be doing any actual resistance work for a while.”

“What do you mean by ‘resistance work’?” I said. “What do you guys do, exactly?”

“We actively resist Streams,” he said.

“By doing…?”

He sighed like he didn’t want to have to explain this to me. “We do things to elicit social unrest and disrupt the system.”

“Like what?” asked Finn, who seemed as skeptical as I was.

“Mostly hacking. Last week we hacked a set of traffic signals at a busy intersection.”

“And what does that accomplish?”

“Chaos,” Alistair said, like it should have been obvious.

Finn and I exchanged glances.

“Look,” Alistair continued, clearly having noticed our apprehension, “Streams is all about control. Containment, order, regulation. Without it people freak out. And we want them to freak out. We want to slap them in the face until they wake up.”

“By causing traffic jams?” I said.

He looked at me impatiently. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Fresh out of school?”

“I guess….”

“Then you don’t know shit about how the system works, all right?”

“All right,” I replied, though I really wanted to argue with him. I just wasn’t sure that I would win.

“Have you guys ever… done a heist before?” Finn asked.

“What do you mean?” said Alistair.

“Like, have you ever broken into somewhere with high security to take something important?”

“We’ve hacked banking kiosks before.”

“Why would you do that?” I said.

“Redistribution of wealth,” he said.

“And where was the money redistributed?”

He pointed towards a row of computers on desks over against one wall. “New equipment.”

“So, just stealing, basically?”

“If you’ve got a problem with stealing, you shouldn’t be here,” he said with a smirk.

“We haven’t got a problem with stealing,” said Finn. “In fact, we’ve got an idea of something that might be worth taking.”

“Oh yeah?”

“There’s an archive in the Paramount Building with—”

Alistair laughed. “The Paramount Building? You’re not getting into the Paramount Building.”

“Couldn’t you guys hack their security or something?” Finn suggested. “A bit of hacking, a bit of social engineering… It could be done, right?”

“And what do you expect us to find there?”

“An archive with thousands—maybe millions—of those application forms for Stream Assignment,” I said. “From less than a century ago.”

Alistair looked mildly impressed. “That’s interesting,” he said, “but doesn’t really fit with our mission.”

“I thought your mission was to take down the system,” said Finn.

“Yes, through social unrest.”

“But this is evidence that the entire foundation of Streams is a lie! Surely that’s better than just hacking some traffic signals!”

“I’ll take it to The Boss, I guess,” said Alistair as he walked through to the storage room of the café. He handed us each an apron. “It’s time for your training, now.”

***

It took less than a day to train Finn and me in the café; there wasn’t much to it as there were hardly ever any customers. The first couple of days we worked with either Izzy or Chop, but then we were by ourselves for the rest of the week. There was always someone in the back room if we needed help, though.

I did end up going back there to get Chop when a young woman came in saying she was looking for a job.

“What makes you qualified?” Chop asked her.

“I’ve worked in a café for the past two years, so—”

“Sorry, that’s not the sort of experience we’re looking for,” said Chop.

“What do you mean?” she said. “What other sort of experience do you need to work in a café?”

“We’re not hiring at the moment.”

“But you just said—”

“If you’re not going to buy anything, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said seriously.

She looked shocked for a moment before turning around and heading out the door.

He chuckled a little once she was gone. “Idiots.”

The next few days at the café went by without incident—they were quite boring. It was not how I expected to spend my first week as part of an underground resistance movement.

There was a meeting at the end of the week, and all of the members were in attendance. The Boss was going to be giving out assignments, and I hoped that Finn and I had proven ourselves enough to get assigned something better than café work. It was also the day that our pay was distributed.

Alistair handed each of us a small stack of cash, for which I was grateful, because we were almost out of the money we’d brought with us. (Living in London was more expensive than I’d thought it would be.)

“Wait a second,” I said as he handed some to everyone else. “The café doesn’t make enough money to pay for all of this, does it? It’s hardly got any customers.”

The others laughed.

“The café is not how we make money,” said The Boss. “It’s just a front for our organization. We have a wealthy patron that funds our efforts.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Their identity is only known to a select few of us, for their protection.”

“Are they an S1, then?”

“We don’t refer to people by streams here,” said Lydia or Kat.

“Right, sorry,” I said.

“All right,” said The Boss, picking up his mobile off the table. “This week’s assignments. Finn and Rae: café.”

***

“So,” I said, leaning against the counter of the empty café, “this kind of sucks, doesn’t it? I mean, if I wanted to make coffee, I could have stayed in Lincolnshire.”

“It’ll get better,” said Finn. “We just need to pay our dues.”

“Yeah, but I feel like we’re the only ones working—everyone else just sits back there on those computers, or are out spraying graffiti on shop windows and stuff like that,” I added. “It all just seems a bit pointless.”

“I know what you mean, but I think that’s why they need us. They just don’t know they need us yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve got bigger ideas,” he said. “We could actually chip away at the foundation of the system, rather than just make a few people late for work.”

“Then what do we need them for?” I teased. I knew we wouldn’t actually be able to do anything without their resources.

He came over and hugged me. “We’ll get there.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” Izzy said, appearing from the back room and heading straight for the front door. “But you two have got to come watch something.” She locked up the front before leading us around back again.

When we got there, everyone was crowded around a couple of computers. She pointed at one of them to indicate that we should go over and look at it. It appeared to be playing video of a live morning news/chat show that was currently airing.

“Our next guest,” said one of the presenters, “is film star, Reginald Sparkes, here to promote his latest film, _Postcards of Yesterday_.”

There was applause when a man—whom I recognized from films as the actor Reginald Sparkes—appeared on set and took a seat in a chair across from the presenters.

“It’s great to have you here with us today,” said the other presenter.

“Thanks, Trisha, it’s great to be here this morning,” said Reginald.

“Tell us a bit about your latest film,” she said.

“ _Postcards of Yesterday_ ,” he said, “is a film about an S2 man who discovers a box of old postcards addressed to his great-great-grandmother, and after reading them he starts to realize that the person who’d written them was actually an S1, and that his great-great-grandmother had carried on a secret friendship with this S1 through these postcards for years. I won’t tell you the ending, but let’s just say it’s not a happy one.”

“I can imagine,” the first presenter said with a small laugh.

“I have to say, though” Reginald continued, “I think it’s a little farfetched.”

The presenters looked startled, like he’d gone off-script.

“I mean, I’ve seen photographic evidence that Streams might not have even existed back when the character’s great-great-grandmother would have received these postcards,” he said.

“I… don’t understand.”

“Streams is less than a hundred years old!” he added emphatically. “People were only just assigned into their streams ninety-three years ago! Everything we’ve been taught about Streams is a lie. It’s not natural, it—”

The program cut to an advert in the middle of his sentence.

“What the heck was that?” I asked Finn quietly.

“I think,” he said, “we’ve just found our mystery patron.”

***

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Finn said, looking at his mobile while I got dressed for work the next day.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Chop just sent me a link to a news article,” he said. “Reginald Sparkes was arrested last night.”

“What?”

He continued reading. “‘Film star Reginald Sparkes was arrested in his home late last night. Sparkes, who was known to have had mental health issues, is reported to have been arrested for possession of contraband, including alcohol, drugs, and weapons.’”

“Are you serious?” I said.

“That’s what it says. It’s just…”

“It’s just what?”

“All I can think is that one minute he was debunking Streams, and the next minute he’s arrested,” said Finn. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

“You’re not suggesting…?”

“I’m just saying, it’s one way of shutting him up.”


	4. Part Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the resistance is compromised, Rae must find a way to bring down the system.

I was surprised when Finn and I reached the café and found several of the resistance group members loading equipment onto a truck out front.

“What’s going on?” Finn asked Chop as he came out of the café carrying one of the group’s computers.

“Didn’t you read the article I sent you?” said Chop. “We’re relocating before the enforcers get to us.”

“What are you talking about? Why would the enforcers get us?”

“You don’t think they have ways of making Sparkes talk? He’s probably already sold us out. Hurry up and start loading!”

We went inside and through to the back where a few people were dismantling computer setups frantically. (The Boss was nowhere to be seen, though.)

Alistair told us to grab a couple of computers off a nearby desk and take them out to the truck. Before we could even pick them up, however, Chop came in, shouting.

“They’re here!” he said, scrambling to lock the door behind him. “They already got Kat and Jeremy outside!”

“Should we go out the back?” Alistair asked, panicked.

“They’ve got the place surrounded!” said Chop.

I looked over at Finn, who appeared scared again. “What do we do now?” I asked him, holding onto his hand.

“I don’t know…” he said. “I won’t let them hurt you, though. I’ll tell them it was all me; that I tricked you into coming with me and then forced you to join, all right? Just tell them that, that it was my fault.”

“I’m not going to do that to you!”

“You have to. It’s too late for me—I’m in shit already, but you could get away from this,” he said. “Please, Rae.”

“I’m not going to abandon you to—”

There was a loud banging on the door and someone on the other side shouted, “Enforcement Services. Open up.”

We all backed up to the far side of the room slowly, as if that was going to make any difference in the long run. I heard the enforcers trying to break down the door and held Finn’s hand tighter, wishing we’d just stayed at the hotel a few minutes later this particular morning. (Or that we’d wised up and realized it wasn’t safe to come back here at all after what happened to our benefactor.)

The door finally flew open and half a dozen uniformed enforcers came barrelling in.

“Put your hands in the air with your barcodes clearly visible,” one of them barked at us.

I held up my arms before I realized I was still wearing my wristband, so I took it off—I didn’t want to seem like I wasn’t co-operating.

Another enforcer came over to Finn and me and scanned our barcodes. “I’ve got an S2 and S3 over here,” he said loudly to his colleagues before grabbing Finn’s wrists and holding them behind his back to cuff them together.

“S2,” said the enforcer who had just scanned Alistair.

“S3,” said the one scanning Chop.

“I’m not an S-anything, pal,” Chop replied, and then spat in the enforcer’s face. The enforcer grabbed Chop’s wrists as well and held them behind his back before roughly shoving him face-down against a desk.

“What are we being arrested for, exactly?” Finn asked as our enforcer cuffed me, too.

“Suspicion of conspiracy to incite dissent,” the enforcer told him.

“Finn and I haven’t done anything!” I said. “We’ve literally just been working in a café for the past week. That’s it!”

The enforcer held my wrist so tight that it hurt. “We’ll see about that.”

***

I expected when I got arrested that I would be taken to a cell of some kind, but instead I was brought into a room with a table and chairs and told to sit there for what felt like hours before a woman came in to talk to me. She was wearing an enforcement uniform, but she smiled at me when she came in.

“Miss Earl?” she said, like she was making sure she’d found the correct room. “Rae?”

I nodded silently.

She took a seat at the table across from me. “I know you’re probably nervous right now, Rae,” she said, “but we’ve just got a few questions for you and then you’ll be able to leave. Your parents are on their way to pick you up right now.”

My parents? That didn’t make me feel much better.

“The boy with you—Finn—told us what happened,” she continued. “We know it wasn’t your idea to come to London and join a group of dissenters; we know he tricked you.”

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to argue, but I knew that wouldn’t help anyone.

“You just thought you were working in a regular café, yes?” she asked.

I nodded again, because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

“So, tell me, why were you wearing the wristband?”

“I thought it was part of the uniform,” I said, trying to think on my feet. “The wristband and the apron. They told me I had to wear it, but I didn’t ask why.”

“All right, Rae,” she said. “I just need to know if you were aware of any illegal activities going on around the premises. That includes conspiracy to commit crimes.”

I shook my head.

“Nobody mentioned anything to you? You didn’t see any suspicious activity?”

“I just thought it was a café,” I replied.

“And you didn’t think it was strange that you got paid in cash?”

“I just… I thought ‘cause I’m an S2 that they couldn’t have me on the books. That’s what I was told.” I was getting more and more nervous with each lie.

She must have been able to tell I was nervous, because she said, “It’s all right, Rae. You’re not in trouble. Your parents are going to pay the fine.”

“There’s a fine?”

“It’s just a processing fee, really. You won’t have a record or anything.”

“Okay…”

“I’m just going to take you to a waiting area now, Rae,” she said as she stood up. She motioned for me to stand as well and follow her out of the room.

She walked me down a corridor, where I spotted Finn coming out of another room up ahead. His hands were cuffed in front of him and an enforcer was pushing him forward towards us. I started to worry that this could be the last time I would see him for a while.

“Finn!” I called out before rushing towards him. My enforcer tried to stop me but I was too quick for her. His enforcer, however, managed to get between the two of us before I could give Finn a hug, “I’ll get you out, okay?” I said to him. “I promise!”

***

I was left to wait in a larger room with several uncomfortable benches and a couple of scared-looking teenage girls—just like me, I supposed—until I was told my parents had come to pick me up. I was not looking forward to seeing them. I missed them, of course, but I couldn’t even imagine how much trouble I was going to be in.

Someone who was not dressed like an enforcer came to get me and take me to the front “reception” area where my parents were waiting. The person handed me over to someone sitting at a desk, who then scanned my barcode.

“Rae Earl,” he said loudly towards the area where my parents—along with several other people—were waiting. I found it strange for him to call my name like that, since I was standing right there, until I realized he was letting my parents know I was available for pickup, like a fast food order.

My parents came over to the desk, looking relieved to see me alive, but also terrified and furious.

“There’s a three-thousand-point processing fee,” said the man at the desk.

“Three thousand points?” my father said. “That’s ridiculous; she didn’t do anything!”

“You can pay the processing fee, or she can be charged as a conspiracist,” the man said. “It’s your choice.”

My father grumbled as he rolled up his sleeve to pay before I was released over to my parents. My mother hugged me tightly and told me how worried she’d been.

“Hold on a second,” I said to her, pushing her away. I went over to the man at the desk and asked, “What’s going to happen to the boy with me? Finn Nelson?”

The man typed something into his computer. “He’ll be taken back to Lincolnshire and detained there until his trial.”

“Can we pay his bail?” I said.

He shook his head. “Says here he’s a flight risk.”

“I’m not paying for some S3’s bail, anyway,” my father said angrily.

“I would pay you back!” I said, nearly shouting. “I’ll pay you back for all of this, I just… I need to make sure my friend is okay!”

“He’s not your friend anymore,” he said, taking me by the arm. “I don’t want to talk about this until we get home. Maybe the drive will give me time to calm down… But I doubt it.”

***

My father was right; the drive home did not calm him down. I could feel the tension for the whole trip, and it erupted when we got into the house.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” he said to me once we were inside. I’d never heard my father swear before. “Running off like that,” he added. “You weren’t even answering your mobile!”

“They destroyed it when I got there,” I said sheepishly. I could tell he didn’t like that answer.

“What were you doing with a resistance group anyway, Rae?” he asked. “This is all because of that S3, isn’t it? He tricked you into going, didn’t he?”

“He didn’t trick me into anything,” I replied. “I went because I wanted to go. Because I was sick of it here and I wanted to do something.”

“You wanted to _do something_? What does that even mean?”

“I don’t believe in Streams anymore, and I want to bring it down.”

“What do you mean, you don’t believe in Streams?” he said. “It’s not something you believe in; it just is!”

“I don’t think it is, though,” I said. “I think it was only introduced in the last century as a way of controlling people.”

“And what’s so bad about control? It keeps things in order and running smoothly.”

“The very fact that a resistance group exists proves that it doesn’t run smoothly! Besides, it’s not natural,” I said. “People in different streams are not fundamentally different. It’s all arbitrary!”

“Where did you even come up with this nonsense?” he said.

“I’ve seen the application forms! People were applying for stream assignment ninety-three years ago!”

“That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows Streams is hundreds of years old!”

“Just because that’s what everyone’s been told!” I said, practically yelling.

“Why would we be told that if it weren’t true?” he said.

“Because isn’t it so much easier to trust something that’s been around for hundreds of years? ‘If it worked for them then it works for us.’ That sort of thing,” I said. “But it’s not something that happened over time; our society’s just been shoehorned into this model that doesn’t fit!”

“So you’re saying that Streams doesn’t reflect the natural order of things?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“You’re saying that I’m no better than the man I pay to clean my rain gutters?”

“Yes, I’m saying that.”

He did not like that answer either. “You think I’m no better than an S3? Are you serious?”

I folded my arms. “Yes.”

“Rae, I— You know what?” he said. “You can think this rubbish if you want to, but please—please—don’t share these theories with anyone. Don’t go stirring up trouble; next time we might not be able to pay the fee. You wouldn’t want a criminal record now, would you? People would know every time you got scanned.”

“Criminal records go in your central file?” I asked.

“Everything does. It’s all in one place,” he said. “For goodness’ sake, Rae, don’t you work with central files at your job?”

“Yeah, but they never tell us what any of it means,” I said. “It’s just numbers.”

“Well, it’s all in there. Your ID. Your occupation. Your criminal record.”

“That’s… good to know.”

***

My parents made me stay at home until my suspension from work was up, though this time they set up the house’s security system to notify them if I tried to leave the premises. They didn’t trust me anymore.

So I stayed at home until I returned to work the next week, and even then I was only allowed to go to and from work, nowhere else. They wouldn’t even let me see Archie for fear that I’d corrupt him.

My first day back at work, I worried that the scanner at the door wouldn’t let me in—that they would have forgotten to reinstate my access—but it did; it was just slow, as always. I had to report to Olivia when I got there, who went over the policy regarding fraternization, before I could take my place at my desk.

I found it strange that my computer had no dust on it after a month without use, but then I remembered that they had someone who cleaned it every week anyway. That someone used to be Finn, but now it was somebody else.

Not Finn, who was currently detained at the local Enforcement Building. Finn, whose trial was coming up soon, and who was probably going to end up imprisoned for a long time, due to his past run-ins with the law. If only he had no criminal record…

I knew I wasn’t supposed to look up people in the database, but no one was around at lunch time, and I was curious. I searched for Finn’s file—he was the only Finn Nelson in the area, apparently—in order to see what his criminal record actually was. But I couldn’t find anything that looked like a list of criminal charges. Just coded fields with numbers.

I guessed that the field code “A348-C” was for stream, because the number in the field was 3. But I had no idea about the rest of them. Surely there had to be some sort of key to decipher what these codes meant, otherwise they weren’t any use to anybody, were they?

I searched through the Net-docs that I had access to on my computer for the code “A348-C” and found a doc with a key for all the coded fields. “A348-C” was indeed “Stream Designation” as I suspected. Before I could search for “criminal record,” though, I heard a noise behind me that nearly made me jump out of my seat.

I turned around and saw a bored-looking young woman picking up the bin by the entrance to the cubicle.

“Hi,” I said to her. “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were there.”

She looked at me for a moment like I’d just said something rude before returning to her work of emptying the bin and leaving. Well, there wasn’t any risk of me fraternizing with the new custodian, that was for sure.

Once she was gone, I found the code for criminal record—“T298-B”—and looked to see what was indicated in that field of Finn’s file. Just a few numbers: 307, 476, 118. I had no idea what they meant, and the doc I was looking at only showed the codes for the fields, not the values.

But it didn’t really matter what they meant, did it? The fact that there was something was enough to get Finn into more trouble than some community service.

I must admit, I didn’t give it a lot of thought; I acted on impulse, deleting the values from the T298-B field. Then I backed it up three times to make sure the data couldn’t be retrieved, at least not easily.

I promised Finn I would get him out.

***

On the day of Finn’s trial, I called in sick to work without telling my parents, and after my father dropped me off at the Dominion Building, I walked down to the Enforcement Building, which wasn’t far. I couldn’t actually sit in on his trial, but I could wait outside the room for the verdict.

I saw him get escorted in cuffs into the room by a couple of enforcers, and he gave me a look like, “What are you doing here?” So I tried to reply, “I’m getting you out,” with my eyes.

I wasn’t sure how long the whole thing took—my parents wouldn’t buy me a new mobile until my grounding was up, though they probably should have in order to keep tabs on me.

When Finn came out, I noticed he was no longer in cuffs and I almost jumped for joy. I wanted to run up and hug him and kiss him and never let him out of my grasp again, but there were a couple of people talking with him and I didn’t want to disturb them. He and the people with him eventually came over to where I was sitting, and he introduced them to me as his parents.

“It’s good to finally meet you, Rae,” said his father, reaching out to shake my hand.

“Yes, Rae, we’ve heard so much about you,” said his mother

“Um, you, too,” I said awkwardly, as she gave me a hug. I couldn’t help but think about how my parents would not be so receptive to meeting Finn.

“We’ve got to get back to work, now,” his father said to him. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Yeah,” Finn said. “I’m just going to head home.”

His mother hugged him as well before she and his father left.

“So…” he added, turning to me once they were gone. “Eden’s Park?”

We walked to the park together in silence, silence that made me worry something was wrong. I thought that everything must have gone all right—he was out, after all—but maybe there was something I just hadn’t considered. He still didn’t say anything when we sat down on one of the benches.

“So…” I said awkwardly. “How did it go?”

“It was… Oh, it was weird, Rae,” he said. “Really weird.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean there was no record of my crimes when they scanned me,” he said.

“Oh?” I said, trying to act surprised.

“No possession of contraband, no corruption of a minor, no conspiracy to incite dissent. Nothing.”

“So what happened?”

“They had to let me go.”

“So you’re just… free?”

“Yeah, I suppose… It’s just so strange, though, right?”

“It’s, um, not that strange…” I said.

He looked at me quizzically.

“I sort of… deleted your criminal record.”

“You what?”

“I started back at work last week, and I just pulled up your file and—”

“Aren’t you going to get into trouble for that?” he said.

“If they ever find out, yeah,” I said. “But I’ll just say it was an accident. I’ll probably get fired, but I hate that job anyway.”

“I can’t believe you’d do that for me.”

“I told you I was going to get you out.”

“So you can just… change records?” he said to me quietly.

“I’m not supposed to unless officially requested, but yeah, I can,” I said.

He grinned at me and gave me a kiss.

***

When Finn told me his idea, I thought it was mad, but brilliant. Going into the database and changing my stream value to 3 so that we could be together. I would lose my job, which I didn’t care about anyway. And I wouldn’t get to marry Archie, but neither of us were really excited about that prospect, either.

My only problem with the plan was that we’d still be in a stream. One thing I liked about the resistance group was the lack of streams. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but I liked the way that people from different backgrounds were able to come together for a common purpose, even if I thought that purpose was a little juvenile, I thought. What good did a little social unrest do, anyway?

The only way social unrest would make a difference would be if something drastic happened to everyone—not just a few people getting in a traffic jam. Something like…

No…

I couldn’t do that, could I?

…Could I?

I accessed the central database master list—everyone in the country—and highlighted the column for A348-C.

I stared at it for a moment. At all the people who’d been classified into these arbitrary divisions. Who’d been ranked. It wasn’t natural. It wasn’t the way things should be.

I was going to make things better.

_Delete._

***

“Rae, tell me exactly what happened,” said the Head of Department, staring at me as I sat in her office once she was back from lunch. Not even Olivia was allowed in the room with us.

“I just accidentally deleted the column of data,” I said as innocently as I could muster.

“And then you backed up the database?”

“That was also an accident!” I lied. “I was thought it was the command for undo!”

She massaged her forehead and muttered something to herself.

“It wasn’t… important data, was it?” I said.

“Rae, it was—“ She stopped herself when she seemed to realize that I wasn’t allowed to know what the column was for. “Look, you weren’t even supposed to have the computer permissions to edit that column at all!”

“That’s not my fault, is it? Whoever set up my computer permissions is to blame for that, right?”

“No one from IT is going to throw one of their own under the bus for this,” she said with a sigh. “But I have to let someone go, or else I’ll lose _my_ job.”

“No, please!” I said. I was fine with the idea of getting fired, but I had to pretend like I wasn’t so as not to raise suspicions.

“Would you rather I get the enforcers involved?” she said.

“Uh, why would I get in trouble with enforcers for accidentally deleting data I wasn’t supposed to have access to in the first place?” I asked.

She gave me a look as if to say, “Oh shit, you’re right.”

“If you’re going to fire me,” I said, “I’m going to need severance pay.”

“Severance pay? Do you think—” she began angrily, though stopped when she seemed to realize that it would be easier to pay me off. “Yes, fine, whatever. I’ll deposit it to your account right now. Just, please leave!”

I tried to look dejected as I left, though inside I was feeling quite proud of myself. I walked past a banking kiosk on my way home and checked to make sure the deposit had been made. Sure enough, there was six months pay freshly deposited into my account.

Now, how to tell my parents that I’d lost my job…

***

Well, I wasn’t the only one who lost my job that day.

When news spread about the data loss, firing me wasn’t enough to save the Head of Department’s skin. I almost felt bad for her getting terminated—it wasn’t her fault the data got erased—but she’d fired Finn, so I didn’t feel too terrible.

I will admit, though, things sort of turned to chaos for a while. People’s permissions were screwed up all over the country. Doors had to be reset to be stream-neutral. Enforcers had to charge people on the basis of the crime committed, not their social rank. Everything was out of order.

There was talk of mass re-assignment, but the logistics were going to take years. It would be like starting from scratch. And people were getting used to streamlessness.

Then people started coming forward. Older people, whose parents and grandparents had told them secrets about a time before Streams. From the sound of it, it was not such a great time; there was war, poverty, disease—all the things we learned in school, but instead of five centuries ago, it was one.

For a time, Streams seemed like a decent solution, a way of maintaining order. But it was soon corrupted. Those in positions of power wanted to keep their power—subsidies for S3s diminished, for example, and voting rights were given only to the upper streams—but most of all they wanted to naturalize it, so their power would be beyond dispute.

Thus the fictitious history of Streams evolving over hundreds of years, as though it were a natural human progression.

By the time I moved out of my parents’ house after I turned twenty, Streams was somewhat a distant memory, though. Something to be studied, but not to be repeated.

Sure, there were some attitudes that prevailed, like former S1s thinking that they were still better than everyone else, but there were also many barriers that had been broken down. Archie, for instance, was training to be a doctor—something he could not have done four years ago in Streams.

He was also getting married.

“Hurry up,” I said to Finn as he combed his fingers through his hair in front of the tiny bathroom mirror. “We’re going to miss the ceremony.”

“We’re not going to miss it,” he said, turning around to face me. “You worry too much.”

“That’s because you don’t worry enough.” I started to fix the buttons on his shirt that had been fastened crookedly. “Besides I need to be there early since I’m actually in the wedding, you know.”

“I know.” He smiled and gave me a kiss before putting on his tie, and we headed out.

It wasn’t far to the wedding venue, so we weren’t late, but I rushed us anyway. I found where I was supposed to go to get ready, and Finn went to get himself a seat for the ceremony.

“All right, all right,” said Archie’s sister, who was acting as wedding organizer. “We’re getting ready to start, so I need you all in formation. Best Man, stand here,” she said, pointing to a spot on the ground. “Best Woman, here.”

I stepped forward to where she was indicating, next to the Best Man.

“Groomsmen and groomswomen,” she continued, “pair up in line behind these two and wait for my signal.”

When it was time, the Best Man and I linked arms and walked down the aisle together. It was a little strange. I always used to think that, at Archie’s wedding, I’d be walking down the aisle with my parents, as it would be my wedding, too.

But I was thrilled to be his Best Woman.

After the other groomsfolk made it to the front, the music changed and I turned my attention back to the centre aisle, where Archie and his parents were walking towards me. I smiled at him and he smiled back. I’d never seen him so happy.

The dramatic music continued once he reached the front, and he turned around as well to see the other groom, Garrett (not the same Garrett), walking down the aisle with his parents.

I noticed Finn sitting amongst the other wedding guests once I got to the front and I smiled at him instead. He and I had discussed the possibility of us getting married when we moved in together, but with the new post-Stream laws, getting married didn’t seem like such an urgent thing as it used to. We were happy with things the way they were right now.


End file.
